Mind Booster Noori

É Um Jogo? (Carta ao Adolfo Luxúria Canibal, sobre #PL118 )

2012-01-25T23:29:00.001Z

[ACTUALIZADO:] Escrevi esta carta para enviar ao Adolfo Luxúria Canibal. Infelizmente o endereço de e-mail público que ele tem não está em funcionamento~~, e não encontro outra forma se conseguir contactar com ele. Assim sendo, agradeço aos leitores que, se souberem como, façam chegar este meu pequeno texto ao Adolfo. Obrigado~~. Felizmente a Internet é minha amiga, e disseram-me como conseguir entrar em contacto. A resposta encontra-se republicada nos comentários deste artigo.

Subject: É Um Jogo?

Caro Adolfo,

O Adolfo não me conhece apesar de já nos termos cruzado, mas eu sinto conhecê-lo mais ou menos. Afinal, eu era ainda uma criança quando o primeiro LP de Mão Morta rodou pelo gira-discos lá de casa, e continuo a contar com o "Há Já Muito Tempo Que Nesta Latrina O Ar Se Tornou Irrespirável" como um dos grandes discos que tenho na minha colecção. É, aliás, da minha experiência pessoal com esse album que lhe venho aqui falar.

Quando o "Latrina" (como eu o costumo chamar) saiu, era eu um estudante do ensino secundário, mas não foi com o CD que comprei que eu vivi o album. Como qualquer jovem da altura, a minha vida naquela altura não era "na sala de casa", onde estava a aparelhagem com leitor de CDs: era na rua ou no quarto. Não foi por isso que o album deixou de me acompanhar: munido com uma moeda de 100 escudos, da qual tive direito a troco, comprei uma cassette audio virgem e gravei o album para a Cassette. Findo o ritual, a referida cassette passeou comigo, do quarto para o walkman e do walkman para o quarto, enquanto eu decorava e cantava, cada frase do album, cada som, cada ritmo. Um ano mais tarde mudei de cidade e fui para a faculdade: a cassette comigo, o CD ficou na prateleira. Afinal as primeiras palavras do album são "Music Is Free", e - desenquadrando essas três palavras do seu contexto - eu era livre com a música que ali tinha, livre de poder andar pelas ruas enquanto a ouvia, livre do "sector dos lazeres" e do "mercado do entretenimento", e "infiltrava-me noutros sectores da nossa democracia" com auriculares nos ouvidos. Não me vou alongar muito mais, mas posso-lhe dizer com toda a verdade que o CD continua na minha terra natal, mas a cassette, essa, já "gasta" de tanto ouvida, tem o nome das músicas "em branco", onde antes se via tinta azul de uma caneta BIC, e é a cassette que ainda rola, por vezes, na minha actual casa, mais de uma década depois.

Hoje dizem-me que, ao ter assim apreciado a vossa arte, vos causei um prejuízo. Dizem-me também que da próxima vez que comprar um computador, e outra vez quando comprar um disco rígido, e outra vez quando comprar um telemóvel, e outra vez quando comprar um cartão de memória para a minha máquina fotográfica, terei de lhe pagar uma taxa, um valor que tenho de pagar caso contrário o Adolfo sofrerá "graves prejuízos", e que tenho de pagar essa taxa porque há a possibilidade de, eventualmente, um dia quando estiver a visitar a casa onde cresci me lembre de pegar no CD e fazer uma cópia dele para o computador, para o telemóvel, para o disco externo ou - imagine-se! - para o cartão da minha máquina fotográfica. Pode acontecer que eu eventualmente queira fazer uma ou mais do que uma dessas coisas, e aproveitar isso para voltar a ouvir com regularidade esse disco, e eventualmente voltar a interessar-me pela sua arte ao ponto de conprar outro disco de Mão Morta. Dizem que é um risco, e que "pelo sim pelo não" tenho de pagar. Quem me diz isto? Quem é que diz que o Adolfo vai sofrer "graves prejuízos" se eu não tiver de pagar mais (nalguns casos muito mais) pela tecnologia que compro? É o próprio Adolfo, segundo diz o sítio web da Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores.

Hoje em dia eu também sou autor - e músico. Talvez o Adolfo tenha sido um pouco uma influência para que isso tenha acontecido. Mas eu - autor, músico - não me sinto prejudicado cada vez que alguém compra um telemóvel e não me dá dinheiro por isso. Não entendo porque é que terei de gastar mais dinheiro com tecnologia - incluindo a que uso para fazer música - em vez de poder usar esse dinheiro para, por exemplo, sustentar o meu "vício" de coleccionador de música. Mas o Adolfo deixa bem claro com a sua assinatura: o Adolfo sofre "graves prejuízos". Eu até penso ter entendido bem algumas coisas que o Adolfo diz, por exemplo quando fala n'"As Tetas Da Alienação". Mas não consigo entender como é que o Adolfo será "gravemente prejudicado" com a não aprovação de um Projecto de Lei que eu sinto ser injusto. Tão injusto que, pela primeira vez, me dirijo a si, para lhe fazer uma pergunta:

Pode, por favor, explicar-me de que forma é que o Adolfo é "gravemente prejudicado" por eu não pagar uma taxa extra cada vez que compro tecnologia? Pode, por favor, explicar-me de que forma é que o prejudiquei quando usufrui o seu album "Latrina", gravando-o para cassette para o ouvir e ouvir e ouvir, e espalhei aos quatro ventos "vocês têm de comprar este album!"?

Sentindo verdadeiramente que isto "É Um Jogo", mas ainda assim na esperança de receber uma resposta a este meu e-mail,
Com os mais respeitosos cumprimentos,
--
Marcos Marado

Private Copying Levies on MP3 Players (2010)

2012-01-25T11:57:00.001Z

Data taken from "de Thuiskopie" 2010 report[1]:

This list focuses only on the MP3 player levies (I intend to use this data to show how AGECOP is trying to convince people of things that are *not* true, using the same source as them):

Austria - 2,25 (<512MB) - 9,00 (30GB)
Belgium - 1,00 (<2GB) - 3,00 (>16GB)
Bulgaria - 2% of manufacturing or import price
Canada - nothing
Croatia - 1.93 per unit
Cyprus - no private copy
Czech Republic (OSA) - 1,5% of import or sale price
Czech Republic (Intergram) - 3% of sale price
Denmark - nothing
Estonia - nothing
Finland - 4.00 (<512MB) - 21.00 (> 250GB)
France - 1.00 (<128MB) - 20.00 (40GB)
Germany - nothing taxed (negotiations going on)
Greece - 6% of the value
Hungary - 0.36 (<32 MB) - 32.95 (> 80GB)
Iceland - 4% of the import price
Italy - 0.64 (<= 128MB) - 9,66 (> 15GB)
Ireland - no private copy
Japan - nothing
Latvia - 1.42 per unit
Lithuania - nothing
Luxemburg - no private copying levy
Malta - no private copying levy
Netherlands - nothing
Norway - no levies
Poland - 3% of the sale price
Portugal - nothing (so far)
Romania - 0.5% (per unit)
Slovakia - 3% of total income of sale
Slovenia - 4.17 (< 2 GB) - 8,35 (> 2GB)
Spain - 3.15 (per unit)
Sweden - 0.34/GB (<= 49GB) - 29.40 (> 250GB)
Switzerland - 0.53/GB
Turkey - levy set by government (always <3% of import/manufacturer price)
United Kingdom - no private copy

If from this countries we isolate those who have a tax per Gb on mp3 players:
Austria - 2,25 (<512MB) - 9,00 (30GB)
Belgium - 1,00 (<2GB) - 3,00 (>16GB)
Finland - 4.00 (<512MB) - 21.00 (> 250GB)
France - 1.00 (<128MB) - 20.00 (40GB)
Hungary - 0.36 (<32 MB) - 32.95 (> 80GB)
Italy - 0.64 (<= 128MB) - 9,66 (> 15GB)
Slovenia - 4.17 (< 2 GB) - 8,35 (> 2GB)
Sweden - 0.34/GB (<= 49GB) - 29.40 (> 250GB)
Switzerland - 0.53/GB

So, there are only 8 countries that tax mp3 per GB, 7 of them European Union countries, all of those with a maximum price per unit.

[1] http://www.thuiskopie.nl/assets/cms/File/Digital_Survey%202010_Web%20version.pdf

private copying levies on memory cards (2010)

2012-01-25T11:04:00.001Z

Data taken from "de Thuiskopie" 2010 report[1]:

This list focuses only on the memory card levies (I intend to use this data to show how AGECOP is trying to convince people of things that are *not* true, using the same source as them):

Austria - memory cards not taxed, only in combination with mp3
Belgium - 0.15 (< 2Gb) - 1.35 (>16 GB) (note: this is not *per Gb)
Bulgaria - 2%
Canada - nothing
Croatia - 0.55 (< 16GB) - 1.10 (>16 GB)
Cyprus - no private copy
Czech Republic (OSA) - 0.058 (per GB) [max. 3.46 per device]
Czech Republic (Intergram) - 0.057 (per GB) [max. 3.4 per device]
Denmark - 0.65 (per unit)
Estonia - nothing
Finland - nothing
France - 0.072 (<512MB) - 0.944 (16GB)
Germany - 0.10 (per piece)
Greece - 6% of the value
Hungary - 0.14 (<64 MB) - 12.45 (>32GB)
Iceland - nothing
Italy - 0.05/GB (>32MB) - 3.03/GB (>= 5GB) [max. 3.00 per unit]
Ireland - no private copy
Japan - nothing
Latvia - nothing
Lithuania - nothing
Luxemburg - no private copying levy
Malta - no private copying levy
Netherlands - nothing
Norway - no levies
Poland - 0.47% of sale price
Portugal - nothing (so far)
Romania - 3% (per unit)
Slovakia - 3% of total income of the sale
Slovenia - 0.03 (per GB / max € 16,69)
Spain - 0.30 (per unit)
Sweden - 0.34GB (<= 49 GB) - 29,40 (>250GB)
Switzerland - nothing
Turkey - value decided by Government, always less than 3% of import/manufacturers price
United Kingdom - no private copy

If from this countries we isolate those who have a tax per Gb on memory cards:

Croatia - 0.55 (< 16GB) - 1.10 (>16 GB)
Czech Republic (OSA) - 0.058 (per GB) [max. 3.46 per device]
Czech Republic (Intergram) - 0.057 (per GB) [max. 3.4 per device]
France - 0.072 (<512MB) - 0.944 (16GB)
Hungary - 0.14 (<64 MB) - 12.45 (>32GB)
Italy - 0.05/GB (>32MB) - 3.03/GB (>= 5GB) [max. 3.00 per unit]
Slovenia - 0.03 (per GB / max € 16,69)
Sweden - 0.34GB (<= 49 GB) - 29,40 (>250GB)

So, there are only 7 countries that tax memory cards per GB, 6 of them European Union countries, all of them with a maximum price per unit.

[1] http://www.thuiskopie.nl/assets/cms/File/Digital_Survey%202010_Web%20version.pdf

100.000 tracks played on Last.fm

2012-01-23T20:26:00.001Z

Remember 2008, when I did a blog post called "50.000 tracks played on Last.fm"? That's right, the counter just doubled, and I now have 100.000 tracks scrobbled there (the image on your side is a screenshot, click to enlarge).

Besides the screenshot, and taking into account what I've written about in the "50.000 tracks" post, I decided to turn this event into another blog post with a little analysis of the data on it. This isn't really a blog post about "music I like" or "what you should listen to", but I also recently wrote a blog post about my "top 10 albums of 2011" on Noori Records' website, so you might what to also read that one.

First of all, the disclaimer I wrote in 2008: "Last.fm doesn't really represent what I listen: lot of the time when I'm at work I listen to what Last.fm plays to me (which limits the choice), and when I'm at home, I'm usually listening to things that will not end scrobbled: CDs, Vinyls or Cassettes. Still, this is probably the biggest (public) data available of what kind of music I dig, and it's pretty cool that I've reached 50K: now you can give some credit to what those numbers show."

A couple of updates to that text, tho:

I had "ins" and "outs" in scrobbling this last few years. After Last.fm stopped being free, I only scrobbled what I've listened on my own laptop's music player, at first. That of course excluded the tons of other music streaming sources I've found, including online services, mainly archive.org. There were some periods in those scrobbles that were different: at some point I was a daily user of T61 (until they threw away their great service to replace with the good-looking yet uninteresting one they have now), and they had once a way to synchronize T61 with Last.fm, so I "went back scrobbling" at that time. Other periods like that happened, and lately I've been using Google Music as my "cloud music player", both at work and on my smartphone, and I've been scrobbling again since then, using a nice Firefox extension to scrobble Google Music plays to Last.fm. Oh, speaking of smartphone, since I changed from a Blackberry to an Android phone, I've also been scrobbling whatever I listen on my smartphone. Which isn't much, really, I stopped being a "portable music" kind of guy for years now...
This is not, probably, the "biggest (public) data available of what kind of music I dig", I started working on having my personal collection of music public on Discogs, and while the collection isn't all there (yet?), I bet that's a better source of information about what music I have and how I rate the release...

Well, apart from that... What do the numbers and statistics actually say?

Unsurprisingly, Merankorii is still my mostly played band. But there's no surprise there, is it? I mean, as I said in 2008: "What can I say? I am a fan of my own work, or else I wouldn't bother doing it...". It won't come as a surprise, then, that Kokori is at 4th (another band I created in the meantime), +ko+ko+ is in the 5th position (a musical project with two full-length albums released... on my label, and the last one mastered by me), Ambiansu is at 8th (this was a side-project of mine, that released one album and one other track for a compilation), and will even probably justify why RedSK is on the 12th: my label released a split CD between Merankorii and RedSK... and I spent a good number of months listening to RedSK while building Merankorii's side, and spinning the CD after it was finished.
Tenhi and Empyrium swapped with DVAR and Marilyn Manson which is surely no surprise for me. While I still love both Tenhi and Empyrium, I managed to get my hands on much of DVAR's discography, and, well... DVAR are GODS. Of course, their short tracks providing 20 or 30 tracks on a small album helps, but that's honestly not the reason: I have "DVAR urges" regularly, and each time I have one of those I spend three or four days in a row listen to little more than DVAR... As for Marilyn Manson, it is not that I really started to feel the need to listen more of it, but when I started using Google Music I uploaded a small part of my extensive Marilyn Manson collection to Google Music, and now I have 746 different Marilyn Manson tracks on Google Music (from 4208 tracks there), and since many times when I'm listening to Google Music at work is a simple random "shuffle", it keeps playing Marilyn Manson tracks...
The only other new entry on the top artists list is Caprice. I referred them in 2008, but at that time I only had two of their albums and I had just knew them. Now I have a lot more CDs from them, and the "Kiwitt! Kiwitt!" (their best, IMHO) had quite a few spins on my computer. I haven't listened much of them lately, tho, but they're working on a new album nowadays, so - who knows? - maybe you'll still see them on my "200.000 tracks" post in eight years ;-)

If you're curious and want to check out one of this bands or my Last.fm profile, here's the link.

#PL118 - Resposta ao artigo de opinião de Catarina Martins

2012-01-10T01:05:00.000Z

For my English readers: sorry, this is one of those rare occasions where I am posting in Portuguese. Don't be afraid - it's all for a good cause.

Este artigo é um comentário ao artigo publicado pela Catarina Martins, intitulado Cópia Privada, e aconselho a sua leitura antes de ler a minha resposta. Isto foi escrito originalmente para colocar como comentário no referido artigo. Infelizmente o sistema de comentários naquele site não permite comentários com mais de 1000 caracteres, e eu alonguei-me um bocadinho mais...

Catarina:

Prometi-lhe uma resposta e aqui a tem. Infelizmente o tempo não me permite a esta altura dar-lhe uma tão detalhada como queria, mas, para já, esta bastará.

Comentando desde o princípio, parece-me que está a misturar "Lei da Cópia Privada" com "Código dos Direitos de Autor e Direitos Conexos". O CDADC existe, sim, e prevê já - desde 1998 - uma compensação aos autores pela cópia privada. De 1991, altura em que a cópia privada passou a ser uma utilização legal da obra, até 1998, altura em que se introduziu a referida compensação, havia o direito à cópia privada, mas não existia qualquer tipo de remuneração ao autor por causa da referida cópia. E que diz o CDADC sobre essa remuneração?

"Com vista a beneficiar os autores, os artistas intérpretes ou executantes, os editores e os produtores fonográficos e videográficos, uma quantia é incluída no preço de venda ao público".

Isto é diferente de dizer que "considera-se esta uma forma de devolver aos autores uma parte da riqueza que criam e que nunca lhes é paga" - a taxa da cópia privada não é devolver nada aos autores, é algo que se lhes dá para os benificiar. Concordamos que esta não é, contudo, a melhor forma de os beneficiar, e que uma melhor forma de o fazer seria, por exemplo com "um investimento público forte na cultura e na ciência". Mas mais do que não ser a melhor forma, esta é uma forma injusta e datada. Injusta, porque ao contrário dos impostos que podem (ou poderiam) financiar o investimento público referido anteriormente, a taxa à cópia privada não distribui equitativamente (ao contrário do que se supõe com os impostos) a contribuição que cada um deve dar para munir o Estado das condições necessárias para exercer os seus propósitos (incluindo investir na Cultura). Ao invés, tenta aplicar um princípio de utilizador-pagador, tal como este é aplicado, por exemplo, em auto-estradas (e do qual o Bloco de Esquerda se tem manifestado, acertadamente na minha opinião, contra). Datada, porque se já seria difícil aplicar adequadamente tal taxa na altura em que ela foi introduzida no CDADC, actualmente é, simplesmente, impensável. Não é possível hoje em dia distinguir o telemóvel que vai ser usado para fazer cópia privada daquele que não vai ser. Não é possível distinguir o cartão de memória que vai ser usado para fazer cópias privadas daquele que não vai ser. E por aí em diante.

Para lhe dar um exemplo: os meus pais, que duvido que durante toda a sua vida tenham usufruído do direito à cópia privada, têm, entre os dois, dois telemóveis (actualmente, eles são trocados por outros com alguma regularidade), um computador (com disco rígido) e um cartão de memória. Os telemóveis usam-nos para fazer e receber chamadas, o cartão de memória está numa moldura digital para poderem ver as fotografias de familiares, e o computador é para escreverem textos, e nem ligação à internet tem. Porque é que eles terão de pagar uma taxa à cópia privada, se não fazem a referida cópia? Temos também exemplos opostos: li recentemente um artigo de opinião num blog, em relação a esta Proposta de Lei, de alguém que diz que entre fotografias e vídeos dos miúdos, gera em média 5Gb de informação. E repare-se que isso não equivale a 5Gb que serão taxados: todo o conteúdo dele é gravado em backup num sistema NAS e com vários discos externos fora de casa, para garantir que não perde informação (sim, nós informáticos temos tendência para ser paranóicos ;-)). Significa isto que ele ocupa, no mínimo, mais 20Gb de espaço de armazenamento - que com esta proposta de Lei passa a ser taxado - a cada mês que passa. É justo que ele tenha que pagar uma taxa à cópia privada por ser um pai tão babado? E se o propósito é ainda o original - seja ele o incentivo à cultura ou devolver aos autores uma parte da riqueza que criam - que sentido faz que o Rui Carmo pague muito mais por isso do que os meus pais?

Mas mais do que simplesmente injusta e datada, a taxa agora proposta é também ignorante (juro que tentei encontrar melhor adjectivo, mas este é o que assume o "menos-mal"...). Ignorante, porque ignora aquilo que qualquer pessoa da tecnologia poderia ter dito se lhe fosse pedido para analizar a proposta: há que entrar em consideração com a Lei de Kryder. Esta Lei (não no sentido legal), que transpõe a Lei de Moore para o storage, diz que a cada dois anos a mesma gama de produtos de armazenamento de dados tem o dobro do espaço de armazenamento e um preço ligeiramente inferior. Não estando quantificada a diminuição de preço, podemos assumir que ela não existe, e mesmo assim chegamos à conclusão que, por exemplo, um disco rígido que, nos dias de hoje, custa 88.62 Euro sem IVA, passa a custar 108.62 (uma taxa à cópia privada de 23%), mas daqui a dois anos um disco do mesmo preço base levará uma taxa de 51%, e daqui a quatro anos essa taxa será de 107% - pagando o utilizador final mais de taxa do que pelo próprio dispositivo. E por falar em IVA - aplicar uma taxa antes do IVA não é ilegal, como se viu com o Imposto Automóvel?

Bem, este comentário já vai longo e não tenho tempo - por agora - para mais. E ainda só lhe comentei o primeiro parágrafo! :-) Ainda assim, espero que este meu contributo inicial possa servir para lhe mostrar um pouco da minha opinião em relação a esta Proposta de Lei, e espero que cumpra também o meu objectivo com ela de a fazer repensar e reflectir mais sobre o que aqui se propõe. Lerei de todo agrado uma resposta a este comentário, se optar por fazê-lo.

Com os mais respeitosos cumprimentos,
Marcos Marado
Autor e Cidadão Português

ACAPOR's President wants to silence people... forever

2011-12-06T21:59:00.001Z

Remember Fran Nevrkla, Chairman and CEO of Phonographic Performance Ltd, a UK music industry association, that wanted death penalty for those who download copyright material from the Internet without the authors' consent?

It is possible that in Portugal we now have a radical of that kind. Someone saying he is Nuno Pereira from ACAPOR left a comment in the Portuguese newspaper Público (check out the first chronological comment) asking the Government to "eradicate pirate parties, Tugaleaks, Anonymous of every ages, Paula's somethings and filthy Ludwig's, whose minds only serve to destabilize our very fragile society, since they are the mentors for the computer criminality that terrorizes our country".

In parts:

Nuno Pereira, whom I've criticized before, is ACAPOR's President. ACAPOR, whom I've criticized before, is the Portuguese association of movie rental stores. You might remember them from the news, since they were hacked by Anonymous during Operation Payback.

Pirate Parties... Well, you know who they are, even if their target is the Portuguese Pirate Party, who have presented criminal charges against ACAPOR in the past, since ACAPOR has violated privacy laws.

Tugaleaks is a Portuguese website inspired on Wikileaks, who's aim is to do the same as Wikileaks but on a local (Portuguese) level. Unsurprisingly, they've also been vocally critical of ACAPOR.

Anonymous... well, not only I'm sure you've heard about them, but I also already told you about them hacking ACAPOR (defacing their website and leaking 650Mb of e-mails). This is Anonymous message to ACAPOR.

Finally... Ludwig and Paula: they're both Portuguese researchers, and both are bloggers. In their blogs, both Ludwig and Paula wrote more than once criticizing ACAPOR and their attempts to restrict free speech amongst other things. Of course, the name Paula might ring a bell if you're a reader of this blog: after all I'm married with her (and I have no wish to see her eradicated, mind you!). Why them? Well... There was a Portuguese Conference on "Pirate Culture" previously this year, and both the Nuno Pereira, the Portuguese Pirate Party, Ludwig and Paula were there doing presentations and debating.

And maybe those "minds only serve to destabilize our very fragile society, since they are the mentors for the computer criminality that terrorizes our country", since if you see the videos from the event (link above) you'll start thinking that Paula, Ludwig and André from the Pirate Party make sense, while ACAPOR's points of view seem more of those of some lunatic. Of course, the "fragile society" in question isn't "our society" but ACAPOR's association. And the "computer criminality that terrorizes our country" that they talk about is the fact that they "use computers to show their points of view in such a well-structured way that ACAPOR doesn't have arguments against them". Free speech, you know?

What scares me is that this guy is doing this kind of thing long enough to prove he's serious about it. And it scares me because he was there, face to face with Paula and Ludwig, debating issues on which they have different positions, but an... "wealthy debate", I guess I can say. And then, each of them went home... and one of them is crying out loud asking for the others to be eradicated.

A long needed blog post

2011-11-25T19:14:00.001Z

I should have written lot's of things on this blog that I've been delaying for a long time... And accumulating issues. Here's a short summary, so I can throw this behind my back:

Activism

ANSOL, the Portuguese FSFE sister association "Associação Nacional para o Software Livre" (National Association for Free Software) is being revitalized, and I am now its direction's Vice-President for the years 2011-2012. If you wondered why I seemed with even less time this last few months, this is probably one of the reasons for it. We've been doing lot's of things, lately organizing the Portuguese event for Software Freedom Day or participating in a Public Consultation on which Open Formats should the country's computer systems use. Today isn't really a "good news" day regarding Free Software in Portugal, since the two parties now in the Government changed their minds since last year (when they were opposition) and decided to reject a proposal that would make the country spend 50% less in Software Licenses by using Free Software.

Music

I've been more silent in 2011, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working. In fact several cool things happened: in March I've released a new album, for the first time in vinyl. A release party was held, here's a small fan-made video of the show:

In August, the latest Merankorii album, "Alain", was released in both cassette tape or tape + CD editions. Here's one of its tracks:

Merankorii - Intermezzo by A Beard of Snails Records

And for December there are also news - some things I'm not yet well sure to publicly state, but one is for sure: I'll be playing live in Lisbon at the 20th, and you're invited to go. Feel free to RSVP in one of the several places where the concert is announced:

I've also participated in various compilations, but let me highlight two of them, because not only (in one case) it has Merankorii, but because both feature new tracks from Kokori, my industrial duo, that spent the year writing what's going to be, eventually, the best album ever: Necktar 2017 Volume 3 and Icaro I. Here's Kokori's track on Icaro I:Inbrase by Kokori

What Else?Well... lot's of things, really ;-), but I guess this blog post is already long enough for a "catch up". I intend to do more of these, but this is not a promise ;-)

The "Music Industry" does it again

2011-10-18T21:40:00.000+01:00

It never ends, the tactics are old but they keep using them - oddly enough they keep working next to politicians.

The sales of music in Portugal fell 40% in the first semester of 2011, comparing to the same period of 2010, according to the Portuguese Phonographic Association (AFP).[1]

They attribute this fall to so-called "piracy" (the unauthorized copy of copyrighted material), failing to explain how to they infer the correlation, and ignoring the studies that suggest exactly the opposite. Worse: still according to them, "this is the hugest fall in a total of 50 different markets in the world", and those include countries with both a bigger and a smaller piracy rate, suggesting that actually there's no relation at all.

But why do they want to suggest such a relationship? Well, AFP requested a meeting with the Culture State Secretary, where they intend to ask the Government to introduce a gradual response law[2] in order to "stop piracy". Such a law would make people considered guilt without the right to a fair trial, take the right to privacy to every citizen, make people pay for a (private) service they can't use, and take off Internet access to an whole family because one of its members was simply accused of doing "piracy" (all together ignoring the fact that Europe is opposed to such kind of laws[3]).

Also interesting to see is that AFP doesn't really care that much into actually doing what they can - without any law changes - to reduce piracy: take for instance into consideration the research[4] that concludes that dumping DRM has both the effect of increasing sales and of reducing piracy, and compare it with the pro-DRM stance they have.

All in all, and to sum up, the answer politicians must give to this kinds of tactics of requests is really simple. AFP's Eduardo Simões stated that piracy destroys the income of musicians, authors, artists and record producers. The answer to such an allegation can only be: "Where's proof?"

[1] http://blitz.aeiou.pt/=f77109

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduated_response

[3] http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.17/3strikes-opposed-isoc-europe

[4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/a-game-we-all-win-dumping-drm-can-increase-sales-while-reducing-piracy.ars

This saturday is Software Freedom Day!

2011-09-15T00:06:00.000+01:00

409 events spread in 84 different countries, Software Freedom Day 2011 is approaching!

Join a local SFD team - Is there a SFD event nearby?

Software Freedom Day is an event with hundreds of teams from all around the world running local events to help their communities understand Software Freedom. One way of joining SFD is to join an existing SFD event. Check to see if there is already a team registered in your area. If there is one, you can always join them and help them to make their events successful. It's FUN to join SFD!

Helps are always in need to organize SFD :) you can help to design marketing materials, spread the words out, decorate the venue, take photos, demonstrate or present about Free Software in the event, etc. Feel free to check out the team map to find the SFD team in your local area!

As usual, ANSOL is organizing the event in Portugal, this time in Lisbon. Here's the schedule for the day's events (sorry, only in Portuguese):

What are you waiting for? Check out where's the nearest place to you where a celebration is happening, and join the free software community to celebrate or to know a little more about what's all this about!

Happy 20th birthday, Linux!

2011-08-24T20:57:00.000+01:00

Newsgroups: comp.os.minix From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi) PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

Este Domingo, não há motivo para não votar

2011-06-03T23:56:00.000+01:00

This blog post is regarding the Portuguese elections that will occur next sunday. Thus, it is written in Portuguese.

Domingo Portugal vai a eleições. Para aqueles que acham que não vale a pena ir votar, ou vale mais branco ou nulo, porque "são todos iguais"... Aqui vai um pequeno (e incompleto) resumo das várias opções. Lembrem-se: o boletim de voto não tem só dois ou três quadrados.

BE - A favor do Software Livre. Contra as Patentes de Software. Combate aos paraísos fiscais. Criação de milhares de empregos na recuperação da ferrovia. Transparência na Administração Pública. Orçamento zero. Contra as medidas da Troika. Revisão de todas as Parcerias Público-Privadas. Contra a extinção do Ministério da Cultura.
CDS-PP - Contra o Software Livre. A favor das Patentes de Software. Signatário das medidas da Troika. A favor do DRM. Comprador de submarinos. Suspensão do TGV. Adiar o novo Aeroporto.
CDU - A favor do Software Livre. Contra as Patentes de Software. Taxa de 20% na banca. Aumento do Salário Mínimo. Redução do IVA. Redução das Taxas Sociais. Transparência na Administração Pública. Contra as medidas da Troika.
MEP - Apoio à reestruturação das dívidas das famílias aos bancos. Cheque-emprego famílias. Ensino pré-escolar universal aos três anos. Transparência nas aquisições públicas. Contra o aborto.
MPT - Prioridade à defesa do Mar. Utilização submarinos para combate à droga e contrabando. Recuperação das actividades marítimas. Criação de um Ministério do Mar. Contra as medidas da Troika.
PAN - Reconhecimento legal e constitucional da senciência dos animais, e criminalizar o seu abandono e maus-tratos. Promover o vegetarianismo. Revisão de todas as Parcerias Público-Privadas.
PCTP/MRPP - Ruptura com a União Europeia. Semana de trabalho com 30 horas. Definição de um salário mínimo Europeu. Defesa do direito não-discriminatório de todos os partidos políticos candidatos se apresentarem à população.
PDA - Acabar com o cargo de representante da República nos Açores. Contra o Plano Nacional de Barragens. Contra a anexação da APDL. Contra a privatização da ANA. Reforço do papel das Universidades na gestão dos fundos comunitários e na definição das políticas regionais.
PH - Direito de voto aos imigrantes com cinco anos de residência. Generalização do voto electrónico. Fim dos governos civis. Renegociação da dívida externa. Eliminar os falsos recibos verdes com mais fiscalização. Adopção de crianças por casais do mesmo sexo.
PND - Combate à corrupção, ao clientelismo e ao amiguismo. Redução drástica do número de deputados. Defesa do direito não-discriminatório de todos os partidos políticos candidatos se apresentarem à população.
PNR - Serviço Militar Obrigatório, Suspensão do Acordo de Schengen, Controlo de Fronteiras, Repatriamento imediato de imigrantes ilegais. Contra o encerramento de escolas. Aumentar a Polícia.
POUS - Contra o plano de resgate imposto pela União Europeia e pelo FMI. Saída da União Europeia. Proibição dos despedimentos. Contra a privatização das Empresas Públicas. Renacionalização da banca e de outros sectores estratégicos da economia sem indeminização nem resgate.Contra a privatização das Empresas Públicas. Renacionalização da banca e de outros sectores estratégicos da economia sem indeminização nem resgate.
PPM - Restabelecimento da monarquia. Alargamento dos horários de funcionamento dos museus. Redução em 50% o número de institutos, fundações e empresas municipais. Contra as Parcerias Público-Privadas.
PPV - Não ao aborto. Não à eutanásia. Não ao casamento homossexual. Reestruturação da Função Pública. Contra fecho das urgências da maternidade D. Estefânia. A favor da manutenção do Ensino Público.
PS - Contra o Software Livre. A favor das Patentes de Software. Signatário das medidas da Troika. Contra a liberdade dos autores poderem ceder os seus direitos ao público em geral. A favor do DRM. A favor do Plano Nacional de Barragens. Contra a extinção do Ministério da Cultura.
PSD - Contra o Software Livre. A favor das Patentes de Software. Signatário das medidas da Troika. Contra a liberdade dos autores poderem ceder os seus direitos ao público em geral. A favor do DRM. A favor do Plano Nacional de Barragens. A favor da extinção do Ministério da Cultura.
PTP - Eliminar a corrupção e o compadrio. Aumentar o salário mínimo nacional. Reposição dos cortes salariais. Acabar com os falsos recibos verdes. Mais esquadras de bairro. Mais médicos de família.

Se quiserem ver os projectos de cada um dos partidos com mais detalhe, têm aqui uma lista dos vários partidos, com link para cada um deles.

Se não houver aqui claramente motivos para se votar num determinado partido, estou convito que haverá, pelo menos, motivos suficientes para não se gostar de vários destes partidos. Estamos sempre a criticar qualquer coisa que há de errado. Há sempre opiniões com as quais não conseguimos concordar. Há, por vezes, um certo sentimento de frustração, como que uma "inevitabilidade" em relação ao caminho que a vida leva. Mas é possível marcar a diferença. Domingo é o dia.

Stop claiming is dead

2011-05-31T18:56:00.001+01:00

There. Does this graph seem to represent a dying format? Yup, I don't think so. Stop saying cassette tapes are dead. You did the same for vinyl, and now you're calling names to yourself...

Portugal's biggest political party wants to turn Creative Commons Licenses illegal

2011-05-02T23:30:00.003+01:00

I've just came back from a two hours and a half long presentation and debate on the Portuguese Culture Ministry's new law proposal regarding private copies.

The announcement of this event raised me doubts and fears from the first moment, and during the event, with the proposal's text presented in my hands and the debate that followed, some of my fears came true. They are several, in fact, but for now I'm going to talk about one of them:

The Socialist Party will present this new proposal for approval in the next Government, no matter if they win the elections or not. In regards to Creative Commons, they support a vision where Creative Commons harm Culture, and in this law proposal they intend to turn them illegal. Here's how (quick translation, I'll soon post the whole proposal in Portuguese online, so others can make their own translation; this is only the part regarding written works, but there are similar items in "Article 3" for other works, except software):

Article 3, point 1 - The authors have the right to the perception of a compensation equitable for the reproduction of written works, in paper or similar support, for instance microfilm, photocopy, digitalization or other processes of similar nature.
[...]
Article 5 (Inalienability and non-renunciability) - The equitable compensation of authors, artists, interpreters or executives is inalienable and non-renunciable, being null any other contractual clause in contrary.

Here: in sum, every author (except software authors, so thankfully free software isn't affected) has the right of getting money out of private copy, and they can't renounce it, so every Creative Commons license, where saying "You are free to share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work" (or actually, in legalese, "licensor hereby grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to reproduce the Work") is illegal.

Update: Here's the whole event was audio and video recorded by several people. One of those recordings (only an excerpt of the debate) is now available online:

Gravação parcial da sessão de discussão da apresentação da PL da Cópia Privada

Update 2: There's a (low quality) scan of the booklet, made by Miguel Caetano, here: part I, part II, part III. Each PDF is two pages of the booklet, there's at least one person wanting to turn this scans into one document only, for easier reading, but - for now - this is what's have available.

Update 3: Here's the "almost full" (only missing the very first part) audio of the whole session:

Download available here.

Happy Document Freedom Day!

2011-03-30T17:56:00.000+01:00

Today is Document Freedom Day!

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general.
Complementary to Software Freedom Day, we aim to have local teams all over the world organise events on the last Wednesday of March. This is the forth year that Document Freedom Day is happening, and we are again looking for people around the world who are willing to join the effort.
DFD's main goals are:
promotion and adoption of free document formats
forming a global network
coordination of activities that happen on last Wednesday of March, Document Freedom Day
Once a year, we will celebrate Document Freedom Day as a global community. Between those days, DFD will be focused on facilitating community action and building awareness for issues of Document Freedom and Open Standards. We hope that you will join the DFD community.

There are celebrations in 36 different cities worldwide, including four in Portugal (Viseu, Lisboa, Porto, Coimbra). I'll be in the Lisbon party, and you should attend the one near you. Here's the list of events, come and celebrate with us!

PS -> DFD in Portugal has a special flavour, since today we heard news that the final law proposal to make open documents and formats in the Public Administration mandatory was finalized, and will probably be voted next friday.

HarperCollins' greed: the "why" of my boycott on them

2011-03-01T23:41:00.000Z

Long story short:

After decades of traditional book business (and what a great business it was, I have quite a good number of books from them), HarperCollins decided to stop selling books to libraries. Instead, they'll sell a new kind of objects that self-destruct after a while.

You probably heard about it by now: HarperCollins decided to stop selling ebooks to libraries, and instead to sell them self-destructing licenses that will let libraries borrow an "ebook" for 26 times only. The arguments against this are obvious, but HC's arguments /for/ it are... well, laughable.

Of course, they announced it and hell broke loose. Every librarian with Internet access yelled against HC, and thousands of others too. HarperCollins now decided to reply... and dig an yet bigger grave.

In an open letter to librarians, they say that doing the business they did for almost 200 years, would now, suddenly, "undermine the emerging e-book eco-system, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors. We are looking to balance the mission and needs of libraries and their patrons with those of authors and booksellers, so that the library channel can thrive alongside the growing e-book retail channel." In other words, they aren't doing it because of their greed, no, they're doing it to, ultimately, "protect libraries and their patrons". Of course they do say they believe such things would happen all the sudden, but they don't say why. But they say other things:

Twenty-six circulations can provide a year of availability for titles with the highest demand, and much longer for other titles and core backlist. If a library decides to repurchase an e-book later in the book’s life, the price will be significantly lower as it will be pegged to a paperback price point.

In other words "we'll sell you a book that self-destructs after roughly an year, but you should be thanking us, because you can buy another one (self-destructable, of course) cheaper then the first cost you".

And they had the nerve to write that offensive "open letter". Bite me. I won't ever buy an HC book until they deserve it again - for instance by respecting books and book readers, which they obviously don't nowadays. And I incite every library to boycott HarperCollins until they show some respect to libraries. HC owes libraries what they are. And when libraries unite, they sure are powerful. Look at the past, what happened with the "Nature case" with University libraries. You can - you should - do the same here. Every kind of library, public or private, should have pride in not letting not even a single other HC book enter its shelves, until HC gets back into the book selling business again.

My Top 10 albums of 2010

2011-02-01T21:07:00.000Z

As some of you might know, I have a tiny record label called Noori Records, besides being a musician in the musical projects Merankorii and kokori.

So, Noori Records is celebrating the change of year by asking its artists to do their "top 10 of 2010" lists, and I've done mine there too. Here's the quick list (read the article for some kind of review and more information about each record):

20th March 2010 (2xCD, Cabinet Pin)
Sol Invictus – The Bad Luck Bird (7”, Auerbach Tonträger)
Antimatter – Alternative Matter (3xCD + DVD + Book, Prophecy Productions)
V/A – Whom The Moon A Nightsong Sings (2xLP or 2xCD, Auerbach Tonträger)
DVAR – El Mariil (CD, Shadowplay Release)
Kokori – init() (EP, A Beard Of Snails Records)
V/A – Now That’s What I Call Retro-Futurism Vol. 1 (2xFloppy, Diskette Etikette Rekords)
+ko+ko+ – Ovo (Single, Witte Dood Records)
+ko+ko+ – Parasite (Single, Witte Dood Records)
V/A – Maere Compilation

On a completely different matter, if you're in Portugal (and since I doubt I'll get back blogging soon) check out this events going on really soon now:
KDE 4.6 release party, next saturday afternoon;
Debian Squeeze release party, next saturday night (gives time to go to both parties);
Portuguese Talkers dinner 2011 (19 years!)

Year Of Linux On Desktop?

2010-12-29T14:39:00.000Z

Every year we read about "the year of Linux on Desktop", but those articles always seem to fail to explain how do they measure it. What does have to happen for us to definitively say "this is the year of Linux"?

Here's some data...

Market share growth from November 2009 to November 2010:

Micrsoft OS's: -02.77% 
Apple OS's:    +30.86% 
Linux:         +53.00%

(using this statistics as a data source)

I don't know what "Year Of Linux On Desktop" means, but I, for one, see a winner in 2010: Linux.

"Piracy" - the polls are over.

2010-12-16T00:11:00.000Z

I'm taking the polls regarding alleged copyright infringement down. After what happened, the votes got back to be on Google. And they were messed up again. I was suspecting something for a long time, but now here's "proof":

Screenshot of the results, taken in September:

and today (December):

votes are disappearing, huh?

Well, I don't really care anymore, I assume my point as taken. If anyone wants to dispute the results, well, I really would like them to make a "real poll", and study this seriously.

For the record, the results are:

18% don't do so-called "piracy"
2% would buy everything they "pirate", if they couldn't pirate it
54% would buy some of the things they "pirate"
16% "pirate" stuff but they wouldn't buy it otherwise anyway

So, for one of the possible uses of this numbers... remember: being the most conservative possible, 34% of the population aren't "taking money from artists", in any possible sense.

Security Flaw on MySpace affects one million users

2010-11-30T18:40:00.000Z

After waiting for a resolution (which didn't happen) and ranting online about it (which had no effect), at the 25th of November I sent this bug report on MySpace:

According to Wikipedia[1], more than 1% of web users use a resolution of 800x600 or less on their web browsers. If those users come to MySpace, they'll be able to log in, but not to sign out (because the "Sign Out" button will be always not visible).

As you can understand, this is an huge security flaw, which MySpace must solve as soon as possible. As it is, it would better not let them log in than forcing them sto stay logged in.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution#Current_standards

Since until now I've got no reply, I'm posting this in the hopes that the issue gets more exposure. Wanna help? Please send yourself a similar bug report, and spread the word!

Mamnuts and PyTalker are dead, long live TZMud!

2010-10-19T19:40:00.002+01:00

I had several choices, really. I could choose to undertake the huge task of fixing Mamnuts (actually throwing away most of the underlying NUTS-inherited code), but it was simply too much work. Or I could take PyTalker by the horns and just make its idea work - which had an estimated amount of man-hours quite inferior to the first option. But... what about maintaining and expanding it afterwords? One of the issues with PyTalker would be that, as soon as a working version was released, I would have to work on implementing each feature Mamnuts had, to be able to have a convincing argument against the usage of Mamnuts, leaving to the side the only unarguable preference: the common "but I prefer C to Python!" (and, really, there's lots of people saying that in the talkers world, imagine that!). I hoped to find a good team to do the job with me, but others would find even less time than me to dedicate to the job. It wouldn't work. Sigh. Well, I would have to do it by myself... with the use of nice Python frameworks. And, while looking at those and who contributed to what, I just saw that there was a third, quite more interesting option: get back to the origins - now without configurability limitations - and assume once and for all that a talker is a kind of MUD with certain particularities. And so, the best way to deal with my issue was, really, find out the best configurable, well-maintained, clean, active, secure, with a nice community MUD codebase, and try to just add the configurable options needed to turn a MUD codebase into a "MUD/Talker codebase", or, in fact, a MUD with a configuration option that would let you set it up to behave like your typical talker, with just something like

allow_utf8 = True
speechmode_default = True
talkmode = True

Now, guess what... that's exactly what you need to do to turn the MUD codebase "TZMud" into a talker. That's right: TZMud is a server to host a multi-user domain (MUD) in the tradition of LPMud, but implemented in the Python programming language, and, since it's 0.9 version, with a configurable option to turn it into a NUTS-like talker.

This is also, obviously, the time to say goodbye to PyTalker and Mamnuts. Don't be sad: you'll be probably able to find me lurking on the TZMud project. And, most importantly, if you're planning on running a talker (or running one already), switch to TZMud. It lacks lot's of features, that's for sure, but that is easily fixed: just open a ticket asking for what you're missing. Feel free to contribute with code, if you can, the project maintainers are quite open and happy to review/accept your code.

This is the last blog post on Mamnuts' website.

Happy Music Day! Here's how to celebrate...

2010-10-01T22:00:00.000+01:00

Today is the International Music Day, and here are my suggestions for you on how to celebrate it... by giving you the info about 10 free (and legal) downloadable albums:

20th March 2010

Today is a day to celebrate Music, but there's an "event" that celebrates music monthly. On the 20th of each month, musicians all over the world are invited to create, compose, interpret and record one song. That means no ideas from beforehand; no writing, performing, recording, mixing, mastering of the track before or after that day. For those who like the concept but don't know how to make music, you can also contribute by making the artwork for one of the month's editions. Today, I'm leaving you the link to "20th March 2010", a double CD showing you what this artists do in one day, and what do they do when they're not limited to 24 hours.

Aural Apocalypse September 15th, 2010

After a monthly celebration, an weekly one. Aural Apocalypse isn't a propper release, but an weekly podcast, allways with great music (mainly Neofolk, Dark Ambient, Neo-Classical and Medieval) and witty comments, including "news of the apocalypse" and a bit of history in the first episode of each month. That's right, this is one of my tasks for every wednesday... The episode I'm recommending you is the one that features for the first time my music (one Ambiansu track), and also refers Noori Records. But, if you like it, don't forget to check out every other episode, this is great stuff indeed.

2 Years Of Torture Compilation

But the international music day is not weekly nor monthly, it's yearly. Another yearly usual happening is for record labels to celebrate their own aniversaries. On February 11, 2010, Love Torture Records turned 2 years old. To celebrate, they have put together this amazing compilation, which I here leave for those who are fans of heavier/harsher sounds. Music styles found here greatly vary, but they are mainly experimental, electronic, avantgarde and noise tracks.

Noori Records 2009 sampler

And after the previous item, I had to show you another yearly label release, this time not to celebrate the label's aniversary, but to celebrate one year of releases. This is the Noori Records 2009 sampler, a lot softer release than what you'll get in the previous recommendation, with Merankorii playing "dark-ambient Jazz", Betray-Ed with its neofolk, +ko+ko+ with their industrial dark ambient, and Ambiansu with two experimental tracks. Every of this bands have more freely available music, so if you like any of them, just follow the links to their own websites...

Various Artists - Falésia 3

Still in the "label compilations", but this one is different: Enough Records (a really nice Portuguese netlabel you should get familiar with if you aren't already) decided to make a compilation devoted to Portuguese projects surrounding the dark ambient genre neighbourhood. After the success of the first and the second, they ended up doing a third (and possibly the latest). This one includes projects like Dyman, Sektor 304, Ambiansu and +ko+ko+. After listening to this, and if you like it, don't forget to check the first Falésia (3 CDs worth of material) and the second one (2 more CDs).

Zero Is Enough

Also from Enough Records, and also in the dark ambient vein, even if with more cinematic elements, comes "Zero Is Enough", a mixtape I made using only Enough-released free music, scanned from the complete catalog, from the earlier releases to the latest stuff. This mix tape is a special made for the RadiaLX event organized by the free radio "Rádio Zero", and was aired (online and offline) for the first time on that event. The excelent cover artwork was made Francisco Noá, in his first collaboration with Enough Records.

Do What Thou Will

Another compilation that is, in itself, a celebration of music, is "Do What Thou Will", a ritualistic compilation created out of the concept of "doing what thou will" using as the starting point an 11 minutes unprocessed and raw acoustic piece of ritualistic sounds, created by "Akoustik Timbre Frekuency". The result is simply this: 333 minutes in 35 tracks and 2 videos, by the artists invited by ATF...

Nouvel Ordre Mondial [A Tribute to Ministry]

Another kind of free compilation, this time a tribute. Ministry was a well known industrial band with 27 years of carreer, until its mentor Al Jourgensen decided to retire the band in 2008. It's discography had many phases, from its initial EBM and experimental Synthpop, passing from thrash, until the latest releases in a more metal vein. But if you think its discography has many styles and variations, you have to listen to what other artists decided to do with its compositions for this tribute: from the almost neo-classical piece from Patient to the thrash metal from the Evolutionary Armageddon covers, you have here something of all - an interesting tribute album in many aspect, and a must-have for Ministry fans.

Meranata

But if sometimes several artists join together to celebrate the tracks of another band on a tribute, some other times bands just decide to enjoy and play with each other tracks. This album is such a case. TVK netlabel invited Merankorii and Nata "to rework tracks from each others back catalog in any way they saw fit resulting in the split release (in more ways than one) that is MERANATA. This is what happened in the aftermath of that experiment. Two very different approaches, but with much common ground."

Necktar 2017 volume 2

"Necktar 2017 volume 2" is a futuristic/electronic compilation with 92 tracks and more than 8 hours of music. It intends to be "A mere journey through time, the great work of anachronistic alchemists, the apiary of a network of precognitifs... Difficult to define Necktar 2017, till the first cycle is not achieved. Currently it is a compilation of hors norme (not normal) music for free sharing, articulated in several thematic episodes. For know what it will be ultimately, unless we can travel through time, it won't be until 2017." In other words, this cycle of compilations intend to be a musical Sci-Fi predictive work, showing us how will be the world in 2017. This "part 2" is concentrated on "Random / Perception / Cycles : Reproduction". This year's volume (part 3) is already in the works, and is going to be about "Macro / Perception / Micro : Evolution".

The Impact of Illegal Downloads On Total Sales

2010-09-30T19:00:00.004+01:00

One frequent rant of mine is the fact that there's no credible study about the impact of "illegal downloads" (not my wording) on total sales, and that, yet, there are lots of policies being made based on plain wrong "studies".

Lately, many things are happening (including arguments behind the approval of the Gallo Report) around Tera Consultants' "Study on the impacts of digital piracy on the EU's creative industries" (March 2010). If we carefully read the report (yes, reading more than just the abstract), thou, we find lots of interesting things. For instance, the fact that the study didn't research the "impact of illegal downloads on total sales", but, instead, decided to have a non-scientific approach to find some kinds of "average values" from the eight "relevant studies" on the issue. Well, in fact, they used the summary from those eight relevant studies presented on Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf (2009 - a working draft). And here, I have a couple of things to highlight:

1) Instead of using Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf latest release paper, they decided to use a working draft;
2) Instead of using Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf conclusions (that can be summed up as "file sharing can be blamed for part of recorded music revenue declines, [but] that hasn’t eliminated artists’ incentive to create and consumers have benefited from increased choice"), they decided to use only a decontextualized table from that report;
3) Many flaws were pointed to the Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf research, but let me talk about one: while in their 2005 paper, where they found no negative impact of illegal downloads on total sales, they used their own data, in this new paper - guess what - they used the same as Tera Consultants: a non-scientific approach to find some kinds of "average values" from the eight "relevant studies" on the issue.

So, let's look to those eight "relevant studies":

Hui and Png (2003) - If you actually read the article you see that the authors acknowledge that:
- their data is completely dependent of the piracy numbers provided by the IFPI (mind you, the most interested party)
- they acknowledge that they ignored the need to research the demand-side externalities positive impact of piracy on sales (as proven to be needed in Conner and Rumelt (1991); Nascimento and Vanhonacker (1988); Shy and Thisse (1999); Takeyama (1994))
- in the same way, they didn't estimate the positive impact of piracy on sales thanks to means of more effective price discrimination (as proven to be needed in Bakos et al. 1999; Besen and Kirby 1989; Jacob and Ben-Shahar 2002; Liebowitz 1985; Takeyama 1997; Varian 2000)
- Last, and yet the most important (in my opinion), their study only analyses data until 1998 (that's right, 12 years ago!), and they highlight that this is all data "before Napster" (dare I say, now, "before p2p", "before torrents", "before pirate bay", "before web 2.0", "before social music services", ...), and that's a really important behavioural shift, that probably changed all the ecosystem of illegal downloads and their impact on total sales
In other words, this study should not be considered;
Peitz and Waelbroeck (2003, 2004)
- they use as data source the IFPI World Report of 2003 that provides industry data from 1998 to 2002. As pointed before, IFPI is the most interested party in influencing the results, so the validity can be argued;
- they assume, because they don't know how to estimate, that the quality of music (which englobes que quality of the music release - compare, for instance, a signed limited edtion 12'' 2LP with the album in DRM-encumbered 128K digital file...) has no influence in buying habits (assuming, thus, that the number of people who use "piracy" to "try before buy" is zero, which is obviously wrong - simply ask your friends);
- they assume that each "act of piracy" is equivalent to the loss of a CD sale (which is obviously wrong), and then...
- they assume that you can do a direct correlation between the rise of usage of p2p networks and the fall in music sales, just because they saw a bigger fall in sales at the same time they saw a fall in music sales
- They state that with broadband, non-piracy times can be spent doing a number of "replacement activities" other then enjoying music, and so people have less time - thus attention - to the music market. Yet, they fail to try to correlate attention-shift with loss of sales
- In the "Discussion" section, they point out several flaws on their model (like the fact that they don't measure "intensity" in piracy activities, or that they aren't considering the non-renewal factor (the industry failed - at least until 2004, where the study focus - to keep their renewal cycle, when people were buying the same album in a different format, cassette replacing the vinyl record, CD replacing the cassette or vinyl, we just weren't seeing people buying the album in a DRM-encumbered digital format after having it on CD or a "previous" format) as a cause of loss of sales). Yet, they decide to ignore those observations on their conclusion...
In other words, this study should not be considered;
Zentner (2006) - Now, this is actually an interesting study, it just isn't a good study to taking a conclusion on our particular issue. In fact, as the origin dataset did neither contain information on quantities of music purchased nor on intensities of music downloads, he assumed that it was not directly possible to calculate the impact on record sales, and thus, for that specific part, he decided to assume things (and that's stated quite obviously on the article): "if 15 percent of the population downloads music, if downloaders are twice as likely to buy music than nondownloaders, and if – conditional on buying – downloaders and nondownloaders buy the same quantity of units". Notice that he didn't get inspiration for this assumptions in any study at all.
Michel (2006)
- The author states that "a possible problem with this approach is that computer owners who did not engage in file sharing may have decreased their music purchases for reasons unrelated to file sharing (yet inherent to owning a computer)", which is not considered in this study. As stated previously, it is fair to assume that there is an (unaccounted) percentage of non-sales directly related to this fact;
- An analysis in this study's "Table 1" suggests that trends and influences greatly vary year by year, possibly in a two-years basis. This is actually why the researcher has data from 1995 until 2003, and yet can only assume a relation between file sharing and CD sales in 2002-2003. Also, in "Table 4" analysis, the author concludes that "the relationship between computer ownership and CD expenditures [, the only relationship being studied in this paper,] weakened from 1998 to 2003. In III.B), the author identifies other four reasons why this paper might not be valid, but the really important thing to quote is in the conclusions section, when the author state, above all, that "results should be used carefully when predicting the long-term viability of the music industry in an environment where record labels (or artists) compete directly with free file-sharing services". While it is arguable what the author means with "long-term", with the previous data we can assume that a) we can identify 2 year cycles, b) in 5 years the relationship weakened, so, if that trend is maintained (which is arguable, but wasn't in Mars' report) nowadays, 7 years later, the relationship might be completely dissipated, so...
...taking the previous items in consideration, it is fair conclude from the article data itself that this study can't be considered valid nowadays;
Montoro-Pons and Cuadrado-Garcia (2006) - This study doesn't appear anymore in the table in the final version of Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf's paper;
Hong (2004, 2008) - This study was centred only and exclusively on the impact of Napster in 2000. As stated before, and shown by the other papers, we can't infer the current correlation between "piracy" and music sales from some event that happened a decade ago;
Leibowitz (2008) - the conclusion of this paper, and on Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf's paper, is quite different from what's presented by Mars' study: in fact it concludes that if we consider all markets (where the universe was 89 different US markets), we cannot relate internet usage with changes in music sales;
Leung (2009) - This is a nice study made by using data from college students of seven different undergraduate classes (from the tone of the paper, I'm assuming this is on USA, but I'm not sure). We're talking about heavy music consumers with no money (they buy four or five digital tracks per month, and one CD every two months). The study implicitly also shows, while it's not its focus, that those students would buy more if they had more money (or if the cost of CDs, iTunes tracks and iPods was less than it is). So, I'll argue that this is a nice study but only representative of a small subset of the global "pirate" reality, specially different from the EU reality, where we have differences like the fact that more than 40% of our countries don't have access to the iTunes music store. Actually, I can go ever further, and tell you my belief (no, I don't have any study showing I'm right or wrong, that's the real issue on this blog post...) that, since you can see that this college students consume nowadays much more music than others (for instance, people with 15 more years than them, even if those others have a lot more money) that it was the setting in which they live - including the cultural influences made by the existence of "digital piracy" - that made them such music fans, and when they grow to have more money, they will be better consumers than they are nowadays. In other words, this is a nice study, but one that only proves that there are lots of dimensions to the problem which need to be researched until we can take any scientific conclusion regarding the impact of piracy in music sales.

So, what I have to say about Tera Consultants' study, and everything else that uses it as a base to take a conclusion or decision? Only that I'm really ashamed, as an European citizen, that we pay blind attention to any study, specially studies commissioned by entities like ICC, whose body of members include three of the four major labels.

Evolution of Operating Systems usage

2010-09-19T01:45:00.022+01:00

I needed this statistics and I'm sure they're somewhere, but I don't know where. So, I went to Wikipedia which has the updated numbers but not something showing the progress. Fortunately, wiki's have revision history, so it was fairly easy to compile what I wanted. Here it is, for the sake of others (or me) not needing to go to the same hassle again.

Wikipedia page used as a source (by using several different revisions of this document)


Q4   2004 - Windows 96.34%; Apple  3.25%; Linux 0.29%
Q1   2005 - Windows 96.21%; Apple  3.40%; Linux 0.29%
Q2   2005 - Windows 96.10%; Apple  3.50%; Linux 0.31%
Q3   2005 - Windows 96.03%; Apple  3.55%; Linux 0.32%
Q4   2005 - Windows 95.50%; Apple  4.11%; Linux 0.30%
Q1   2006 - Windows 95.29%; Apple  4.30%; Linux 0.31%
Q2   2006 - Windows 95.08%; Apple  4.40%; Linux 0.41%
Q3   2006 - Windows 95.01%; Apple  4.45%; Linux 0.44%
Q4   2006 - Windows 94.10%; Apple  5.41%; Linux 0.38%
Q1   2007 - Windows 93.17%; Apple  6.22%; Linux 0.45%
Q2   2007 - Windows 92.78%; Apple  6.23%; Linux 0.74%
Sep. 2007 - Windows 89.10%; Apple  4.00%; Linux 0.81%
Oct. 2007 - Windows 91.76%; Apple  4.46%; Linux 0.81%
Nov. 2007 - Windows 91.45%; Apple  4.48%; Linux 0.81%
Dec. 2007 - Windows 92.88%; Apple  4.32%; Linux 0.88%
Jan. 2008 - Windows 91.79%; Apple  4.12%; Linux 0.76%
Feb. 2008 - Windows 92.13%; Apple  4.34%; Linux 0.77%
Apr. 2008 - Windows 93.94%; Apple  4.47%; Linux 0.81%
May  2008 - Windows 93.98%; Apple  4.39%; Linux 0.83%
Jun. 2008 - Windows 94.06%; Apple  4.33%; Linux 0.89%
Jul. 2008 - Windows 93.64%; Apple  4.31%; Linux 0.90%
Aug. 2008 - Windows 91.95%; Apple  4.49%; Linux 0.96%
Sep. 2008 - Windows 93.61%; Apple  4.86%; Linux 1.04%
Oct. 2008 - Windows 90.40%; Apple  5.50%; Linux 1.16%
Nov. 2008 - Windows 90.50%; Apple  5.41%; Linux 1.16%
Dec. 2008 - Windows 90.50%; Apple  5.24%; Linux 1.16%
Jan. 2009 - Windows 91.10%; Apple  4.81%; Linux 1.02%
Feb. 2009 - Windows 91.03%; Apple  4.77%; Linux 1.04%
Mar. 2009 - Windows 90.99%; Apple  4.81%; Linux 1.05%
Apr. 2009 - Windows 91.22%; Apple  4.95%; Linux 1.13%
May  2009 - Windows 91.30%; Apple  5.01%; Linux 1.12%
Jun. 2009 - Windows 91.24%; Apple  5.06%; Linux 1.12%
Jul. 2009 - Windows 93.18%; Apple  4.59%; Linux 1.05%
Aug. 2009 - Windows 93.06%; Apple  4.59%; Linux 0.94%
Sep. 2009 - Windows 92.77%; Apple  4.59%; Linux 0.95%
Oct. 2009 - Windows 92.52%; Apple  5.87%; Linux 0.96%
Nov. 2009 - Windows 90.52%; Apple  6.48%; Linux 1.00%
Dec. 2009 - Windows 90.22%; Apple  6.57%; Linux 1.04%
Jan. 2010 - Windows 92.02%; Apple  5.79%; Linux 1.08%
Feb. 2010 - Windows 91.60%; Apple  6.58%; Linux 1.12%
Mar. 2010 - Windows 91.34%; Apple  6.63%; Linux 1.14%
Apr. 2010 - Windows 90.95%; Apple  6.61%; Linux 1.15%
May  2010 - Windows 90.88%; Apple  6.67%; Linux 1.22%
Jun. 2010 - Windows 89.53%; Apple  6.93%; Linux 1.31%
Aug. 2010 - Windows 88.92%; Apple  7.72%; Linux 1.33%
Sep. 2010 - Windows 88.66%; Apple  7.82%; Linux 1.34%
Oct. 2010 - Windows 88.40%; Apple  8.22%; Linux 1.50%
Nov. 2010 - Windows 88.01%; Apple  8.48%; Linux 1.53%
Dec. 2010 - Windows 87.82%; Apple  8.87%; Linux 1.58%
Jan. 2011 - Windows 87.54%; Apple  8.97%; Linux 1.64%
Feb. 2011 - Windows 87.36%; Apple  9.27%; Linux 1.66%
Mar. 2011 - Windows 87.15%; Apple  9.27%; Linux 1.82%
Apr. 2011 - Windows 87.00%; Apple 10.44%; Linux 1.88%
May  2011 - Windows 86.58%; Apple 10.34%; Linux 1.95%
Jun. 2011 - Windows 86.00%; Apple 10.05%; Linux 2.15%
Jul. 2011 - Windows 83.30%; Apple 10.26%; Linux 2.07%
Aug. 2011 - Windows 82.58%; Apple 10.91%; Linux 2.25%
Sep. 2011 - Windows 82.41%; Apple 11.10%; Linux 2.41%
Oct. 2011 - Windows 86.15%; Apple 10.37%; Linux 2.53%
Nov. 2011 - Windows 85.8%;  Apple 10.7%;  Linux 3.0% 
Dec. 2011 - Windows 80.83%; Apple 11.20%; Linux 3.00%

(I intend to update this article from time to time - hopefully at least once per month.)

Pequenas Conversas, É Bom!

2010-08-23T19:00:00.003+01:00

"Pequeno É Bom" is a monthly meeting about independent editions. I've participated several times on this meetings, and there are some videos where you can listen (in Portuguese) to my points of view regarding the independent edition. Here are the movies:

Switched from Blackberry to Optimus Boston (Andoid)

2010-07-02T00:09:00.001+01:00

Since I have this blog that I write here about each cellphone swap I do, even if this is the first time I'm writing about it only after the switch has been made. Part of the reason for that is that I wasn't really planing to swap phones: I've been really happy with my Blackberry Pearl, even if the 2 years old telephone was starting to ask for an update: GPS for the occasional walk in the city in places where I need Google Maps (I need that a lot more than you might think: I don't drive, and I don't have any kind of orientation skills - I lived 6 years or so in Coimbra, and with an effort I still can get lost in that city; curiously, now that I have a GPS on the phone, I didn't tried it yet) and HDSPA are welcomed. Yet, it was this phone appearing that made me change it - that and the fact that Paula was craving the Blackberry for herself (spoiler here: she now wants another one like mine). For comparison, here are two movies of both the phones:

Blackberry Pearl

Optimus Boston

But's not what you want to know, right? Is it worthy? Well, the summary is: Boston kicks ass. Two possible disadvantages, and my worries, are:

I'm switching to a cellphone without physical keyboard, and I am used to type a lot on my cellphone;
It was impossible for me, whatever I did to try it, to use up all the Pearl's battery in less than 24 hours. I'm not asking for 24 hours, but I would expect a phone to manage to stay on for the duration of a day - minimum 16 hours. I still didn't have one "usual day" with my phone to make sure of how much does it take to discharge to the point of shutting down, but I'm starting to think that possibly it won't stand on that long, for the kind of use I expect to do with it.

More stuff: migrating was totally easy - there a Google App called "Google Sync", available for lots of cellphones including Blackberries, that send your stuff (in my case contacts and calendar) to Google.

I just installed it, run it on my Blackberry (via EDGE, so I left my SIM card on Blackberry and started playing with Boston without SIM), and it just started uploading contacts on one side, and they were appearing on the other side. How? Well, one of the first questions the cellphone made me was something like "do you want google stuff?", so I said yes, inserted my credentials, et voilá - contacts, calendar, mail, all on the phone at once. Oh, of course it needed connectivity, so when it said to me "do you want to use wireless?" I said yes, configured the AP (because it isn't open WiFi), and I was online. What about exchange or other "corporate-stuff" Blackberries are so known for? Well, painless is the word. Boston comes already with Roadsync applications installed by default, with their icons and widget on one of the three virtual desktops. The name of the apps "roadwhatever" made me not to touch them, but touching on the widget it just told me "do you want to configure your exchange account?" Now, setting up an exchange account usually sucks, right? Not this time, it was just next-next-next-done. There, calendar and mail on the phone.

I am planing on writting a more interesting blogpost on the future (including pros and cons of this phone, Android, why isn't running Debian yet ;-) and stuff like that, but that will have to be for another time :-) If you don't want to wait, well, I sometimes kind of talk about it on my friendfeed...

XVI FEIRA LAICA

2010-06-25T16:24:00.000+01:00

XVI FEIRA LAICA
Dias 26 e 27 de Junho
14H-20H
Bedeteca de Lisboa | Olivais | Portugal

Now with sixteen editions, the biggest Portuguese independent fair returns to its most regular place, for two days of cultural fair trade, networking and music. Highlighs in this edition for the concerts going on during the event, activities for kids with Mini-Laica (opportunity for kids to trade things they don’t want anymore) and story telling; the traditional second-hand stall (books and records); the “Science Is My Mother” wall in the expositions space in Bedeteca and a typography workshop by Oficina do Cego.

Poster by José Cardoso

I'm going to be there during all the event, in Noori Records' stall, and invite you to also come and say hi. More information (in Portuguese) can be found at Feira Laica’s website. See you there!

Piracy talking? Hush! (Or how Google doesn't like what I have to say)

2010-06-17T20:32:00.001+01:00

Last month I wrote about "piracy" - you know, the non-authorized download of copyrighted content - in this blog post. For it, I made a poll, using blogger tools (that uses a Google service to create polls), where I was asking questions about "what would you do if you couldn't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content". The options were something like this:

I don't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content
If I couldn't do it, I would buy everything I now download
If I couldn't do it, I would buy some things I now download
If I couldn't do it, I wouldn' buy anything I now download anyway

I now came to my blog to see something else (don't ask me what, I can't remember), and I just noticed the big 404 you probably see on it:

I don't know why the poll was deleted, I heard nothing from Google regarding it, but I'm surely not going to quit doing this just because Google doesn't like my polls. No, I'm creating another poll. For the record, and I have nothing but my word on this, last time I've checked more than 40 votes where in it, and 0 of them were in the "I would pay for everything I download if I couldn't download it" option.

So, here's the poll, again. If you had voted previously, please vote again, and help spread the word... Thank you.

What would you do if you couldn't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content?online surveys

[UPDATE:] And then, the Google poll is back online. Just to be sure, please vote on both...

Poll about "piracy", please vote and spread the word

2010-05-29T00:53:00.003+01:00

OK, I'm asking and pointing out for years about the fact that so-called "scientific studies" "proving" that "piracy" ("unauthorized" download of copyrighted material) is bad (like this latest about how many VAT countries are arguably loosing thanks to "piracy") always have the same (and biased) flaw: they assume - obviously wrongly - that each downloaded without authorization piece of copyrighted bits (whatever they are: movies, music, books, software,...) would be a sale if the person didn't have the chance to download it. In other words: these studies assume that you would buy every crappy movie or album you download from the pirate bay if, well, the pirate bay wasn't there. Which I wholeheartedly believe is utter crap.

So, since nobody does nothing about this (yes, I'm criticizing the journalists out there), I decided to do something myself. I know this is not scientific, but I spread the challenge: get me a scientific study about this and I'll use your data. Until then, well, this is what I've got. I wish I had at least 100 votes to give some meaning to the results, so, please spread the word about this poll. Thank you.

PS -> The poll is on the right sidebar of this blog. If you're reading this via RSS, please go to http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com. There's also a direct link to the poll.

Thank you.

[UPDATE] seems that the good folks from Google decided they didn't like the poll, so they took it down. Last time I've checked, more than 40 votes where in it, and 0 of them were in the "I would pay for everything I download if I couldn't download it" option. A new blog post about this will come soon.

[UPDATE 2] A new blog post about this, and with a new poll, not hosted by Google, is here.

HOWTO have wireless working on an ASUS EEE PC 1001P in Ubuntu

2010-03-07T01:36:00.003Z

HOWTO have wireless working on an ASUS EEE PC 1001P in Ubuntu

or, alternatively,

HOWTO add AR2427 support to Ubuntu

UPDATE:

This is the last update I plan to do to this blog post. Ubuntu 10.10 (at this moment only available in it's "Alpha 2" version) already supports this out of the box. Thus, the most recommended procedure is to install Ubuntu 10.10 or later. No other support is being offered regarding this issue.

It's pretty simple, really. This blog post is being written just because all the "other ways" of doing it I've seen on the web until now were painful in comparison.

Open a terminal, and type:
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/daily/2010-06-15-maverick/linux-image-2.6.35-999-generic_2.6.35-999.201006151505_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.33-999-generic_2.6.33-999.201003061003_i386.deb
reboot

Oh, how I love free software :-)

Update:
The brightness controls for this laptop are kind of messed up when you install Ubuntu there, and get even more messed up when you update the kernel (what I said you to do before in order to get wireless working). To fix it, you have to do, in a terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
change the line that says
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux"
save the file and quit, and then, in the terminal, type:
sudo update-grub
reboot

Update 2: Notice that now the kernel version I'm telling you to download in this blog post is different. This kernel version has a couple of bugs solved that affected 1001P netbooks, so it is recommended that you use this one instead.

Update 3: See the top disclaimer.

SellABand changes hands... and business model

2010-02-25T20:03:00.000Z

As I told you in the lastest blog post, SellABand went bankrupt.

Soon after, aquisition rumours started. Then, it was official. And a couple of minutes ago, the website was back online.

Business as usual, right? Wrong.

Users trying to log in SAB again are greeted with a notice of some new Terms of Service - which you agree or you have to cancel your account. The new Terms of Service have a funny clause, one that radically changes SAB business model. In 4.5, they state that a believer can't take back his money if it's on SAB for more than 15 days. OUCH!, this is more than a change, this is not acknowledging the real SAB problems, while failing because they take out the incentive to actually be a believer... What an huge #FAIL: this new SAB is, automatically, a lot worse than what it was.

When canceling (because I don't accept the new TOS) my accounts, they said to me:

Dear Merankorii,

We would really like to hear the reason why you do not want to accept the new Terms and Conditions and stop participating on SellaBand.

Here's my reply:

The new 4.5 clause makes believers being forced to loose their money, even if the band they wanted to succeed abandons the project or otherwise doesn't reach its goal. With the new terms, believers stop having the ability to be "believers of some specific artist(s)", and are thus forced to be "believers on SAB". While that might work to some believers and bands, that radical change of concept doesn't work for me both as an artist and a believer. Thus, unless/until you change the TOS again, I want to withdraw my money on SAB and quit both my artist and believer accounts. I don't count on coming back to SAB as an artist until this 4.5 changes to something I feel more fair for me, as a band, to purpose to my fans, and I count to get back to being a believer *only*if* I find a band that I like so much that I'm willing to bet with my money in, taking into account that I might never see that money again -- which doesn't happen with any SAB artist at the moment.

SellABand goes bankrupt

2010-02-23T19:52:00.000Z

I've written about SellABand in the past:

2006/09:

[...]SellABand, a German startup that tries to act like a record label for registered artists. I also intend to do a full review on this later, and to sign Merankorii there, but I have to confess that I don't believe it's business model will make this service survive. Anyway, the fact that startups like this are starting to appear just show that there's a need to do something into the new music market reality, and Web 2.0 might be a key tag on that future. I also think I'll talk more about that in my presentation on BarCamp Portugal.

2006/09:

When I talked about the actual music industry scenario with the technological advances we're seeing on BarCamp Portugal, I said that new stuff was needed, and that some webapps are walking towards the solutions needed (like Amie St. or SellABand) but we weren't there yet. Well, yesterday I knew about Treemo, the next step towards what we need.
[...]
While new features are surely going to appear, their model business will hardly change - but will, perheaps, evolve. Yet, and under the actual stance that, I don't see them as being a viable way for artists to earn money with their art, but it's a good step towards it.

2007/02:

SellABand - I promised a full review of it that I never did (shame on me). To give you an example... I have a musical project and I've used the internet to promote it - and even to get the label that released my last album. Of all those music services my music can be heard, SellABand is the one where I probably have less people listening to it - but in the other hand is the one that possibly granted me more fans. Also, Last.fm and SellABand were direct creators of revenue: I sold at least one CD thanks to each of them. What's SellABand? What makes it so different? No better than this page to explain it, but basicly bands, for free, create their profiles there, with (at their choice) free-to-listen music. "Believers" (the name for listeners) may "believe" in an artist by buying one "part" of the band ($10 per part). Then, "Together Believers have to raise $50,000 to get their Artist of choice in the studio. At any point before your Artist has reached the Goal of $50,000, you can withdraw your Parts and pick a different Artist. You can even get your money back. It's your music. It's your choice." If one band reaches $50,000 (in four months two already did), a CD is released, you get a copy, 50% of the profits go to the band, and the other 50% are distributed to their believers.

2007/05:

SellABand also keeps going on, and are, at least, a very successful case of an indie label - after all in less than an year they've managed to launch several bands albums and compilations, besides organizing events - for instance. Here listeners pay to give the bands a chance to release an album, and after they can make money out of it.

2007/09:

But the big question here remains: what's the really good way of doing this? How to create the "Record Label 2.0"? Every one of the three concepts for music have problems (SellABand, Launch A Label and the $100 label), and while ideas can and should be taken from stuff like Open Source or examples like Swarm of Angels, there's still no idea of how to create the "killer record label", that which is fair to everyone (from the artist to the public). I wrote my ideas of how to create the perfect record label [6] in the past, even if it was just a collection of loose thoughts in a way that seemed to make sense. There's no answer yet, but it's definitively something interesting enough to make me think.

In 2007/10 I actually interviewed SellABand. All of it is relevant, but let me highlight this part - more interesting when we think about it's state of bankrupcy:

When it comes to SellaBand I am very confident that it is a sustainable business model. The relationship of the artist with his or her fans is a unique one that is very difficult to break. Imagine seeing 50,000 dollars roll in on your account. Imagine realizing your dream because thousands of music fans believe in you. Imagine seeing an artist you supported on MTV. All of this magic is happening and will happen a lot more for a very long time.

In 2008/07 I interviewed Equal Dreams, a SAB competitor. This is what they had to said regarding SAB:

Compared to the other services Equal Share provides the artists with more flexibility in defining what he or she is actually selling to the audience and for what price; first of all, there are no pre-set target goals, but the artists can define their own funding needs; after all the quality of the produced music does not necessarily correlate with the amount of money spend in the project. Nowadays this is true more than ever as the prices of digital recording equipment have come down so drastically. Artist could also use Equal Share together with a record label/producer to gather a partial funding for the production. Secondly, the co-funding, which works with a pre-order concept, can be flexibly assigned to even just one song, and the pre-order price can be set as low as 0.50 EUR. We think this is more attractive from the customer’s point of view than being prescribed to invest tens of euros. Fans can be updated about the progress of the production project using the internal messaging system in the Service.

In 2008/11, I wrote:

They're changing for better, but they're still too far from where they should. Let's see how this goes...

In 2009/06, I questioned some bands decisions regarding their editions, based on SAB figures, and questions that should also apply to SAB themselves.

...

Today SellABand's website gives us this message:

On Friday February 19th, SellaBand AG requested provisional suspension of payments (moratorium). This was granted by the Court in Amsterdam on the same day. Yesterday, Monday February 22nd, this moratorium was changed into bankruptcy, with appointment of, Mr Paul Schaink, an amsterdam lawyer, as trustee. The trustee wishes to inform the 'Sellaband community' that, apart from a few technicalities, the completion of a transaction with a potential buyer of the business, is to be expected soon, in order to make a fresh start, safeguarding both the rights of Believers and Artists. More news will follow shortly.

I don't know what "shortly" is, but I'm sure I want to know about it. In the meanwhile...

artists and believers are talking about it on SAB's "Get Satisfaction"
an old SAB forum (before there was an official one as reactivated and old users are talking there
An artist from SAB decided to create a site dedicated to SAB's bankrupcy

There's one thing I know for sure - this bankrupcy is not SAB's business model fault, it is their management fault - just ask anyone from its community.

Personal Top 20 decade bands

2010-01-03T16:37:00.002Z

Sorry for the lack of propper formating and links, this is a blog post being written in a rush, via cellphone.

I've seen more than one hundred "top music lists" in the last month: being end of year and end of decade (spare me the math, people *act* as this was an end of decade, and that's what matters), it is no surprise that we get so many lists, and, well, all of them (the music ones) are subjective and kind of personal, so not only I'm not going to comment them, but also I'm not going to hide it: this blog post is highly personal, and lists what were, for me, the 20 most important music acts of this decade. Personal, I insist.

Black Metal band ColdBlooded (and probably also Death Metallers NecroSlaughter, but those won't be a part of this list since they ended up never going public, with music released or gigs played) is a really personal choice: they are a part of the reason that made me understand what it is to be a musician today, what can you achieve by yourself, the reality of Portuguese small labels, and several other things. Not only their "Sangue Barbaro" release is great, but their existence was, by chance, an important piece in my path as a musician. Heavily related with it (specially with NecroSlaughter) is Mordor, my "old Metal band". It was an important experience and step for me, where the process was more important than the result. Now defunct, its track "Dystopia" is what's worth listening of it, and the example of what Mordor could have been if it wasn't just a process, the path that led me as a musician to try something else... and what ended up validating my steps as a musician by myself... and so, the third in my list, Merankorii, my experimental one-man-band. Writing about Merankorii would be a project by itself (maybe one day I'll write a book or something about it), but for this post I'll just say that Merankorii is... "the musical me". You can listen or download lots of free tracks or albums, or buy some of its records. Merankorii is a pretty active musical project, and disregarding compilations and similar collaborations it has released 9 albums, with the 10th comming really soon. Another inspiring Portuguese one-man-band, and the fourth of this list, is Ambiance, unfortunately virtually unknown and yet one of the best Portuguese acts we have and one that, for me, mark the Portuguese music history of this decade. Personally I think that "As Dez Esperas" is its best album, and if you're willing to know this band you should grab that album. My story with Ambience's M. Is once again a proof that the era of rock stars is over, and that bands have to be more accessible than ever. My interaction with him was so good that we ended up creating a musical project and an album together: that is the story of the creation of "Ambiansu", considered by some as "better than Merankorii or Ambiense alone". Only time will tell what the future reserves for this project, but I believe that you'll hear more about it, even if not a lot more. Anyway, it was already worth it, and its record will always have a very special place in my music collection. +ko+ko+, another Portuguese one-man-band, is a musical project created in 2009, when its debut album was released (by Noori Records), and it is important for me in many levels. It is, IMHO, a great album, which I helped producing, and it is for me the proof that nowadays anyone can create great music, if they have the will to do it. The seventh is being announced in this post: kokori. I don't have any clue about what's going to happen to that musical project, but kokori is yet another experience, and yet another example of how different things are in the music world nowadays. It appeared almost by chance, and it is a musical project created by me and the guy behind +ko+ko+. If nothing else, the only track we've done is going to be released soon in a compilation. Then, a triple: Empyrium, Tenhi and Neun Welten. These three neofolk bands play the type of neofolk I enjoy and inspires me the most. Heavily linked with Mother Nature, they are different but complement themselves. Empyrium was an exercice of perfectionism. Album after album, its work was getting more and more defined, until their last, the perfect album, was done and released. After that, the work of Empyrium was done and the project disbanded. A great collectors package was released with every Empyrium work and a book explaining it all, so grab it if you get the chance. Tenhi is darker, colder, more introspective. A different take on the subject, they've been aweing me (and its fans) album after album, and I'm sure that I won't be able ever to think about this decade about reminding them. They're making something beautiful and new from what's ancient, and they work as a proof that there's evolution in music. Neun Welten, a relatively new act, is for me something as a bridge between Empyrium and Tenhi: its recently released second album surely sounds more Empyrium-ish than the first, but... It's not really a good time for me to talk about N.W. since I still need to have more contact with the new album. DVAR and Caprice, needed to be introduced together, are 11 and 12 on this list. DVAR is simply the most "inovattive" band there is, and Caprice a DVAR-ish (in mood) introduction to the neoclassical faerie world. Grab DVAR's complete discography, if you can (being released by Russian labels add to their mistery an "hard-to-grab" factor), and the latest Caprice works.

Sunn O))) was great in the decade, introducing drone to the mainstream. Ashram is the proof that simple can be beautiful, showing us the future of neoclassical music. Current 93 proves that indie bands can make it, with its legion of true fans and Tibet's non-stop work making new and different albums in a breathtaking pace. The decade begun with Jack Off Jill's latest album, and a prelude to Scarling.: less shock rock, still grrl rock, this is simply what indie rock should be. Jessicka from Scarling. created another musical project "The Ingenues" (only one digital single released so far), let's see if they make into the 10's list. Speaking of shock rock, it's no news that I consider Marilyn Manson a genious musician, but this decade was my "departure" with his works: despite Holy Wood and The Golden Age of Grotesque being excelent albums (totally different, but both really good), I didn't really followed his works after that (and from what I've heard I didn't miss much), nor even went to his latest concerts in Portugal: my boycott to major labels includes Interscope since it is a subsidiary of Universal... but the great news about Marilyn Manson came already in the last month of the decade: Marilyn Manson's contract with Interscope expired, so now he's free and working on a new album... may 2010 bring us a great new MM record. And, well, talking about MM I had to talk about #18 and #19: Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are two bands I don't actually musically enjoy enough to buy them an album, but they surely marked the decade, to the point that if this list had only two name, they had to be these. Their message is clear: stop whining, music is more alive than ever. Some of the lists I've been reading come with rants telling us that this decade was not a particulary good one on music (OK, some of those who wrote about it can never be taken seriously - yes, I'm looking at you Belanciano), but these two actually gave us, more than music, or business models, a message: the next decade, regarding music, will be brilliant if we let it go that way. Finaly, the #20: Astra Autisma. This one is hard to explain, go listen to it yourself. A warning tho: it's something that won't last...

Everybody loves a freebie

2009-12-18T18:18:00.001Z

2009, the second year of Noori Records existence, is actually the first "complete" year of Noori Records activities. We know that everybody loves a freebie, and with that in mind, we've setted up a free compilation album called "Noori Records 2009 sampler". Here, you'll be able to listen to some track from the four Noori Records public releases that were made during this year.

Click on the cover image to listen or download the album!

Here's more info:

=== Noori Records 2009 sampler ===

1) NR005 * Merankorii - April in Portugal 4:07 2) NR007 * Betray-ed - Forgotten Landscape 3:00 3) NR007 * Betray-ed - My Impervious Homeland 3:23 4) NR010 * +ko+ko+ - Dark Swan 8:11 5) NR010 * +ko+ko+ - Little Harbour 7:46 6) NR011 * Ambiansu - The Train's Bar 5:23 7) NR011 * Ambiansu - Clearing 10:51 ----------------------------------------------------- Total: 42:41

# NR005 - 02/04/2009 - V/A - April in Jazz
# NR007 - 20/07/2009 - Betray-Ed - Haunting Memories
# NR010 - 24/11/2009 - +ko+ko+ - What Are You Gonna Do?
# NR011 - 24/11/2009 - Ambiansu - Tagebuch

This is a free promotional compilation regarding Noori Records' public releases in 2009. Feel free to know more about each of them at http://noorirecords.ning.com . Also, here are the links for the bands' websites, send your love to them!

Merankorii - http://www.reverbnation.com/merankorii
Betray-Ed - http://www.last.fm/music/Betray-Ed
+ko+ko+ - http://www.reverbnation.com/pluskopluskoplus
Ambiansu - http://www.myspace.com/ambiansu

The author of the picture used on the cover is pa1nt, and is covered by a CC-BY license.
Check out his pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pa1nt/

Ambiansu - Tagebuch

2009-12-11T20:36:00.000Z

Many of you know that I have a one-man-band called Merankorii, but only a few know that I also have another musical project, called Ambiansu.

After interviewing M., the person behind the one-man-band "Ambience", whose latest album "As Dez Esperas" I considered one of the 10 best albums of 2007, we kept contact, and one thing leading to another made us want to try something different. The result, Ambiansu is more or less what you could expect from a fusion of Merankorii and Ambience styles (and something that people are generally describing as better than any of those two projects alone, but I'll leave that for you to decide).

Almost two years later, we had a musical project with one album released: "Tagebuch".

Tagebuch is an opus of 5 pieces, a mix of what's classical with what's disruptive, and what's traditional with what's unconvencional. Instead of entering into much details, I'll instead ask you to listen. It was released in a 500 copies limited edition CD in cardbox, and it costs only 8€ (postage included). And the best part of it? If you buy it until the end of the year, for each CD you buy, I'll offer one to a library.

Before you ask: no, we don't intend to have the album for sale in digital form. On the other hand, it costs less than your thypical mp3 album, I'll offer one to a library with each purchase, and you can allways rip it to your favourite format and give the CD to a friend (yes, this is a promise that we won't charge you for "piracy" or any other of those silly things).

So, what are you waiting for? ;-)

Reasons to buy cassette tapes

2009-10-04T01:43:00.000+01:00

Last weekend a friend couple ended up the night coming home for some tea, chess and chat. I changed the record in the player to the beautiful white marble Fire + Ice's "Birdking" vinyl, and that led to a conversation around music, where I, perheaps annoyingly, ended up bragging about my music colection showing this or that vinyl or CD, mostly talking about artwork, limited editions and what attracted me about this or that album. Nothing too extensive or boring (I hope, for their sake).

At one point I showed the latest C-Utter release (actually because of its artwork and packaging, uncommon for a tape), and got as a reply "now that's something I don't understand". It was simple: my friend understands everything about why I prefer physical to digital (music-wise), and what's the attraction about vinyl records or (more commonly understood) CDs. But cassette tapes? Why? They went to their homes before I had the chance to reply, but the question stood on my head. So here's one possible reply:

Most people that buy cassette tapes do it by fetishism. I can understand that, and it's more or less similar (or even a sub-case) to the "physical release fetishism), and, like every other fetishes, it actually has an emotional part, not mandated by reason. But that's actually not my case, not in the particular case of cassette tapes. I want physical releases, and a cassette tape is a physical release - and that's as far as I can go fetishism-wise.

So what are the reasons why I buy cassette tapes?

Well, one of them is that... cassette tapes are cheap. Really cheap. No, I mean it. As an example, I can tell you about my second to last cassette tape purchase: a Thanatos album. I bought it directly to the record label that released it - at the time in two formats, tape and CD. The CD version costs $13.98, the tape version (the last copy, I suspect) cost $0.99 (or something like that, I don't want to lie, but if it wasn't that it was only a couple of cents less). See the difference? Exactly the same album, different formats. Well, I listen to tapes anyway, I have tapes anyway, it's not like I have a burden, or that I'm buying a lesser version. For me, it's more or less the same, only super-cheaper. Is this a reason or what?

But there are other reasons. That C-Utter cassette, "Urban Hermits", was only released on tape. The same thing about Astra Autisma's latest, self-titled, release. And this is more common than you would believe. So, what to do? Refrain from having that album or buying it on tape? No question here, this is a great reason to buy compact cassettes.

Finaly, the most arguable one, but one that I'm paying more and more attention (maybe because I am also a recording artist). Preservation. Yes, you heard it right. People talk to me about the cassettes saying "but they break the tape, heat messes with them, they're unreliable, it takes a lot of time of putting it back together when something happens with its tape"... but they're not looking to two crucial (for me) aspects: not only tapes "degrade gracefuly" (the sound gets poorer, but it doesn't just stop working, unlike CDs or digital files), but they actually have more longevity. What does that matter? Well, my music colection is actually already crumbling to dust. Several CDs unplayable, one cassette tape dead (recorded in 1976, 33 years ago), and counting. What percentage of it will I be able to play out in a decade? Will my grandsons be able to listen to the music I created? To me, preservation matters. Oh, sure, you can shoot me a "if you want preservation, go vinyl!". And I agree. But tapes are way cheaper to manufacture, so there's lots of music on tape you can't find on vinyl.

I understand if you still think buying tapes is silly. Really. Also, I don't mind :-) But, there, here are my reasons (or at least the ones I can remember of at this time of the day, my cup of tea is already empty, which must mean this blog post is bigger than it should) to buy compact cassettes.

Direitos contra Direitos

2009-09-05T00:46:00.000+01:00

I'll be there, representing representing DRM-PT.

Where are we heading to?

2009-08-12T20:03:00.000+01:00

Some interesting stuff lately:

The "Portuguese version of Google Summer of Code" is "Sapo Summerbits", with its 2009 version already going on with 10 approved projects. From those, two are quite interesting to me:

"Erro de Sistema" (translated to "System Error") is going to be an Open Source 3D Animation Short Movie ("open content film"), made entirely with Open Source and about Open Source. The script is already published, and the team is getting more contributors. Work on the storyboard and concept art has already started. The project will use Open Source tools like Celtx, Blender, Pencil, Debian, Ubuntu, Ardour, Audacity, LMMS, Transverso DAW, Gimp, Inkscape, Cinelerra, Kdenlive and Farmerjoe. The student behind this project is João Alberto, which you might recall as being one of the two guys who made the 3D Animation Short Movie "Playground", which I've talked about here in the past since its soundtrack was made using Merankorii tracks.
"Portucale" is going to be a Real Time Strategy Game about the History of Portuguese Conquests. It will be written in "C/C++" (maybe a mixture of the two?) and Javascript for user interaction with the game's interface. It will use NASM, SDL, Boost, zlib, libpng, libxml2, OpenGL, OpenAL, libogg, libvorbis, cryptopp, wxWidgets, gamin, BFD, enet and DevIL. I think it will be a fork of 0 A.D..

Facebook bought Friendfeed, supposedly to get its staff into their R&D. This is a huge blow to Friendfeed users, which - it's easy to see - aren't happy with the decision. The biggest question is wether (or, in fact, when) Friendfeed will just be shutted down. Facebook isn't a replacement for almost every Friendfeed user: there are the few of us that simply refuse to have a Facebook account (I'm in this group, as you already know if you're a regular reader of this blog), but for the others there's still the simple fact that they are two really distinct web apps with really distinct communities. Not only Friendfeed isn't replaceable by Facebook in terms of features - something that Facebook people might want to change - but specially the two services have different purposes. So, people are already planning "the future", their jump. From people asking for good methods to backup all their Friendfeed data (including their social graph), to people asking Facebook to just make Friendfeed's code Open Source, or people actually looking into alternatives. I've been looking into those alternatives myself, and the most convincing one for me was Identoo.com, because it lets you do almost everything that Friendfeed does (until now I only missed the "Hide" functionality), adaptation and migration is more or less quick, and it is mobile-friendly (heck, here it is better than Friendfeed: instead of using a fftogo-like mobile portal, I can use Identoo's website in the mobile without problems). I didn't considered in my tests one fact that makes Identoo even better: Identoo is nothing more than an installation of the Open Source platform NoseRub (similar to what Identi.ca is to Laconi.ca), which means that the development of NoseRub (thus Identoo) is transparent, and we can actually affect where is it heading to (even if not with code, just by making bug reports, suggestions, feature requests and such). Is it as good as Friendfeed? No, but it can turn out to be as good or even better, and it is good enough for when Friendfeed dies (if you, like me, won't believe that Facebook would open source Friendfeed's code). When I heard about FB buying FF I was worried, now I'm relaxed about it.

The WTF moment: Microsoft was told it can't sell "Microsoft Word" on the United Stated while it still has the ability to open XML, DOCX or DOCM files that have "custom XML" (and also pay a fine), thanks to a patent infringement. Ridiculous, like every other patent case... Of course, this being Microsoft, and them having the money they have, they'll appeal and try to rule the patent as invalid. And they'll do it again and again until they manage to win. The bad news is that they still don't see patents as bad (how could they, when they use their own patents to try to scare their competition?), just invalid (like every other patent against them would be, and neither of those patents owned by Microsoft are, for sure).

The RealDVD case is finally over, the making DVD copies program is now illegal in the United States. Yes, people can make copies of their DVDs, but they can't invent a way of doing that copy, nor use a tool to make that exact copy. Am I the only one seeing this as obviously stupid?

And the final rant of the day: two guys were convicted in UK of refusing to decrypt data. These are, as far as I know, the first two victims of 2007's law that gives authorities the power to force people to unscramble their data. "Privacy? Rights? Pfft, we can't have those if we want to take down the terrorists!"

SciFi

2009-08-02T14:57:00.000+01:00

I'm an avid reader of Science Fiction since I was a kid (the great collection of SciFi books from my elder brother and specially from my elder sister were a great help for such). Many don't understand what I see on SciFi, when the response is quite obvious: SciFi is a futurology practice of telling you the possibilities of our future, an help for us to understand the choices we have today to help us shape the future. So when I read some news of today about some practices that shock someone, I usually aren't shocked: it was something already predicted by someone, and that means something. Fahrenheit 451 talks about a society where books are taken out from their owners, a couple of weeks ago Amazon decided to take out some books they sold from their "owners". 1984 is a book that talks about a society where people's houses are watched ("Big Brother is Watching You" is an expression that comes from that book). Yesterday came the news that United Kingdom are making a program to keep an watch on more than 20.000 families using CCTV cameras. Now, the question really is: do people understand what's at stake? Do they know the choices? What are they doing to make the world turn into the direction they want? For instance, it still puzzles me how can people vote the way they do...

Proud

2009-08-02T14:51:00.001+01:00

I'm proud. Proud of doing what I do, proud of having the friends I have, proud of being the one who did what I did, or make someone do what they do. Pride isn't an ugly thing, is something fulfilling. I am proud - and feel real joy - each time I see the fruits of my doings, specially when they are things that have value by themselves, even if I don't interfere any more, not even as an observer. Does this make sense? I don't know, I only had to share this with you: lately I've been proud, because finally I'm seeing the results of my doings, the results of the fact of me being, and being the way I am.

bits

2009-06-19T22:58:00.000+01:00

Yup, I'm still pretty much alive. There are so many things to do, and so many things I want to do, that I really don't find any time to write on this blog, and after finding Friendfeed as a way to let my thoughts escape, I really don't think I'll ever return to use my blog as I used to. But I still like having a blog, and for so many times I've found myself thinking I want to write here again. So, this is what to expect: sometimes, rarely I suppose, I'll just write something, rant a little bit, and say almost nothing. Personal blog, okay?, it's fine to do just that :-)

I've been quite busy in a number of fronts. Work, Merankorii, Noori Records, I'm also now officialy a member of ANSOL... And there are lot's of things that urge to get people to act, specially if you take into account the whole craziness of lately regarding digital rights, copyright, freedom, privacy and so on both in an European level (specially with the Telecoms Package, then the event of the Pirate Bay trial and everything that "floated" around it, and then the three-strikes-like things, or the internet censorship like what's possibly going to happen in UK or Germany) and in Portugal (and things are really muddy on those fields too, but I'll probably reserve some time to talk properly about that later).

One thing that has been keeping me excited for a couple of months now are the "20th's": Cabinet Pin is a micro-label that organizes a monthly compilation where artists can participate by following the rules: they have to do a complete track in one day only - the 20th of each month - and then submit it. I've been doing it (almost) each month, and I really like the concept and the results. I'm really fun and an artistic challenge, and I've been trying to convince a couple of other musicians to also participate... Maybe you want to give it a try? Anyway, tomorrow is the 20th and is a saturday, so it will be the first time that - I hope - I won't be in such a hurry and with such an high-constraint as usual... Let's see what will come from that, having an actual entire day instead of - like what happened once - having less than one hour till midnight to get finaly started...

And now, AvatarCamp is running (today and tomorrow) and I'm "there" via Selva (my Portuguese text-based virtual world). So, excuse me, but I have a virtual barcamp to attend to :-)

Taking the "name your own pricing" model one step further

2009-04-03T16:28:00.001+01:00

There are many ways from which I could explore this issue, but as you can probably see by the lack of updates on this blog, I don't really have much time to write about this - I have more important and/or interesting things to do... Anyway, this blog post can work in three ways: 1) to tell you about one experiment I did, how it went, and what will I do now that the experiment is over; 2) to improve my comment on André's blog post about Portuguese people (in Portuguese), where he states that "Portuguese people think that everything that has to be paid is too expensive"; 3) to improve my comment on Miguel's blog post about tips and tip jars, where he says that some tips are "socially accepted" while others aren't...

Yesterday, the 2nd of April 2009, my micro-label Noori Records released its first "Pro CD Audio" (a term generally used by labels and distributors to describe Audio CDs that aren't CD-R's), a limited edition beautiful (as you can see in the picture) compilation called "April in Jazz".

I've been playing in my mind with the concept of the "name your own pricing" model in my mind for a long while: first it was the Nine Inch Nails experiment, releasing an album for free in digital format, selling it also as a physical release that soon was sold-out, and Radiohead's "In Rainbows", where people could choose how much to pay for the (digital version) of the album. From March 2008 I decided to let people buy Merankorii digital tracks at the price of their choice, and in May 2008 I wrote about why wasn't all my music free. Yet, and after many hours thinking, reading and learning, I decided to take the "name your own pricing" one step further.

At the 2nd of April, "April in Jazz" was released, and got sold out. News about the album release were spreaded via e-mail to Merankorii and Noori Records fans and friends, and because I was more of less afraid of the results I decided to tell first (and it ended up being only) about it to Portuguese people (because shipping costs are less that way). And so, the challenge was made:

[...] and doing it in a very special way: you choose the price. That's right: it was your money that made this release possible, so you are the ones who have the right to tell how much is it worth to you, how much you're willing to pay.

There are several things that you have to think about this: probably the most important one is that I wasn't selling the CD on a widely available website where everyone could click and buy, I was talking to true fans, and only to them. Still, here are some data about the results of the experiment:

More than 50% of the buyers paid more than I would ever dare to ask for a CD;
I hadn't a "price" in mind, but the price I would probably choose for this release is the same as the lowest price people paid for the CD;
If the edition had the double of its size, and everywhere else paid 0 € for it, and those other copies needed to be shipped to the moon, it would still be profitable;
20% of the people who bought it didn't like to have to choose how much to pay for it.

WOW, Noori Records and Merankorii fans totally ROCK.

So, is it true that Portuguese people always think that everything is expensive? I don't think so, if you make them wanting to get it (whatever 'it' is you're trying to sell). So, is it true that people won't tip artists? No, I don't think so - but you'll have to make them comfortable in doing so. Having a tip jar in Merankorii's website never helped me getting money (well, I got $0.20 :-)), but when people feel they have to pay something for something, they can be very generous. What about this experiment, what will happen next? I really don't know, but one thing I'm sure of: I'll keep thinking and trying to test several models that feel right for everyone: artists, labels, fans, buyers, freeloaders, everyone. If it's fair, it's good for everyone. And I don't think that putting buyers in the position of "OK, now I have to chose an amount to pay for this..." isn't that fair, that good, and, as I stated before, not everyone liked the idea. So, I probably won't do this again. But that doesn't mean that the experiment isn't worthy - it is, and a lot. It let's you be a lot more transparent with your community, and the community will show a lot more about themselves.

Think about it.

The new Facebook Terms of Service

2009-02-27T18:31:00.000Z

Sorry about the lack of links in this blog post, its was written offline

So, Facebook fsck'd up, and then reverted to the old Terms of Service. I'm glad to see that wasn't enough, since lots of people actually ended up reading the previous Terms of Service, that were already bad enough.

The most offending - for me at least - on any version of Facebook's TOS was the "blank contract" clause, a clause unfortunately seen in lot's of Terms of Services, and that basicly say "you're agreeing with this but you shouldn't even bother reading this stuff, because we can change it whenever we like and you automaticly signed the new terms".

Fortunately, it seems, a new set of terms is being drafted and scheduled to replace the old ones by the 29th of March. Now in a phase of discussion (with their users only, so those who don't have a Facebook account because they don't agree with the actual terms - probably the most critics about them - don't have much chance of voice their worries about the new Terms), this terms (until further re-draft, which might happen thanks to the comments being submited by Facebook users) replace the previous "blank contract" clause with this:

12.1 We can change this Statement so long as we provide you notice through Facebook (unless you opt-out of such notice) and an opportunity to comment

12.2 [...] we'll give you a minimum of seven days notice

Unfortunately, I still think this is hardly acceptable. You are warned about the new terms in the service, and if you don't act in seven days, even if you didn't read your Facebook messages in that period, you are automaticly accepting the new Terms.

With this, further discussion about other items is more or less irrelevant, since even if all the rest is acceptable, there's no warranty that one month after you sign it, the Terms are still the same. Remember: this isn't acceptable in any "paper contract" you sign, how come should it be acceptable in an online contract?

Anyway, let me highlight some other items in that Terms that should worry you...

2.3 For content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos and videos), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub.licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of ("use") any content you post on or in connection with Facebook

3.2 You will not collect users' information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scapers) without our permission

4.5 You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date

5.6 You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Wall and 32665) without our written permission

6.2 In the event you change or deactivate your mobile telephone number, you will promptly update your account information on Facebook to ensure that your messages are not sent to the person who acquires your old number

Sorry Facebook, to get me as an user, you still have a lot of work to do.

[Merankorii - Angellore] new album released!

2009-02-16T11:50:00.003Z

[Updated with link to an online store selling this CD]

Merankorii's 7th album, [Merankorii - Angellore], was released yesterday, 15th February 2009.

This album, a split with Angellore, shows two faces of the same story - We - one noisy and urban (Merankorii), and the other neofolkish and pagan (Angellore).

The album was released in a 60 copies limited edition by NgH Productions, and it is the first Merankorii album in a printed CD.

If you're interested in buying it, ~~feel free to contact me~~ here's an online store selling it. The album price is 8€.

I hope you'll enjoy this new album!

New free stuff ('cause free is what you like)

2009-02-03T10:20:00.003Z

This is a quick post, just to let you know a couple of things, both related to my musical projects.

First of all, my Metal band "Mordor" is officially setting itself "deceased" with the release of its last track, for free, in a 2CD Metal compilation: Carrying the Deadly Blast Vol. 3&4 is a free, Creative Commons licensed, double CD Metal compilation, feature tracks from bands like FluiD, Odium, Mordor, Nihil and Elgibbor.

The other news is about the first movie of a promising couple of directors: Playground is a short movie made in Blender, with a Creative Commons license and a soundtrack by Merankorii.

Here's the movie.

Enjoy!

2008 is over, welcome 2009

2009-01-19T09:13:00.000Z

2008 is over. It's peak, for me, was obviously the 27th of December, the day of my marriage. Being a married man is... not that different. I have a ring on my finger now, and that's a difference, but the really nice thing about being married is actually living with Paula, something that could happen without the ring :-) Anyway, the wedding went really well (and I even did something I wasn't expecting, and acted like a crying baby for a couple of minutes), and our honeymoon was excelent. Now that I'm back to "real life", working again, there are things that change. Living with Paula is awesome, but the adaptation has quite a few funny episodes. For instance, who gets to control the waking alarm and choose at what time it should be set to fire up, in which side of the bed is its place, or - most importantly - if it will wake us up by playing CD (my choice) or radio (Paula's choice). Or, for that matter, what CD should we be listening to at this very moment: I just had to change CDs! O:-) Oh, and where will we get space to store those tons of excelent books Paula have? She argues that we should use the space reserved to my tons of excelent CDs, but that's obviously not the right answer :-D

Another news from me is that I have now, as a birthday/Yule gift from her, a Stylophone. It's a cute little musical instrument, and a quite addictive one. I wonder how much time will it take to "suddenly disappear", as I tend to play it quite annoyingly for hours. Don't worry, I only plan to release stylophone-played tracks that were previously approved by her :-)

2008 was an intense year for Merankorii: two albums released ("A Viagem" and "Split") and participation in a few compilations: "Anti-Nuclear Music Compilation", "Killing In The Name of Reverend Murder ...Is Our Business (Vol. 1)", "Evocation", "The World Of All Evil" and "Okkulth Magick I". In this year I kept the "one track per month" iniciative, meaning that each month I published one new mp3 of Merankorii into the wild. One real interesting thing about this experiment is that, even if all my music is licensed with a Creative Commons license, there are a few Merankorii fans that, while liking the music enough to want to listen to them, don't actually want to pay for it. Thus, I'm pleased to make them happy by releasing one track per month. It's great to have the feedback I got from this: both from people telling me "thanks" for the iniciative, and from those telling me "hey, when is this month's track? Will I have to wait for the last day of the month to get it?" :-) 2009 will surely bring you more Merankorii news: I can tell you that Merankorii's 7th album is going to be released really soon now!

Speaking of music, and because people tend to do lists every time an year ends, here's my "top 10 2008 albums" list, that exclude everything with the hand of Merankorii or Noori Records. Here is it (without any relevance to the order, they're ordered by "when did I buy it"):

Caprice - Kywitt ! Kywitt !
ThanatoSchizO - Zoom Code
Edo Notarloberti - Silent Prayers
V/A - Fairy World IV
Ashram - Ashram (2008's re-edition)
Les Fragments de la Nuit - Musique du Crépuscule
Sol Invictus - Lex Talionis (2008's re-edition)
Marilyn Manson - The Early Years, Volume 2
Cranes - Cranes
V/A - La Nuit des Feés 2

Actually, this is the best time to revise my list of "best from 2007":

Dismal - Miele Dal Salice
Antimatter - Leaving Eden
Tenhi - Folk Aesthetic 1996-2006
V/A - Fairy World 3
Ambience - As Dez Esperas
Corde Oblique - Volontà d'Arte
Knox Om Pax - Laudanum
(r) - In Pink
V/A - La Nuit des Feés
Sol Invictus - The Killing Tide (re-edition box)

I guess someday I'll take some time and do the same for 2006... But not today.

Blood Axis in Portugal

2008-12-23T23:55:00.001Z

I won't make it, I'll be having the time of my life, in my honeymoon. But if you're free, you really should ponder on going to this gig:

Event: Blood Axis
Time: January 02, 2009 7:00PM
Location: União Colarense, Sintra, Portugal

24 € (no dia/door)

20 € (com reserva/reservation)

30 € (reserva com jantar/reservation with dinner)

More info: http://www.myspace.com/ummomento

Why I don't rent movies

2008-11-28T10:30:00.000Z

Three associations of rental movies stores, one Portuguese, one Spanish and one French, joined efforts and created an "anti-piracy civil movement". While I could argue that "civil" is a bad word to describe such movement, this wouldn't catch my eye for long, but it did, since they created that movement for the purpose of getting the Telecoms Package to be approved by the EU Council without the emend 138 (that states that whatever the Package says, personal rights should not be trumped over), and they actually managed to get what they wanted. Anyway, when confronted about how bad for European citizens it would be if the amend was dropped, they failed to justify why they don't like it, and instead mumbled over and over about piracy piracy financial losses piracy piracy piracy... I tried, for three days, to get them talking about 138, and why they don't want that, but instead of getting a justification, I've heard tons of things about piracy and how bad their business was.

During the discussion, and because they felt that I must be pro-piracy (which I actually am not) because I don't agree with them, they tried to confront me by asking a curious thing: what was the last time I rented a movie?

Now, more sober from the discussion, I started to think more about that question. There are lot's of people that never really were into renting movies, but that's not my case. My reply was something like "for years", but now, thinking more about it, I can say with some certainty that the last movie I rent was more or less four years ago. Why?

Well, I lived in Lamego in my youth, and there I never was really into renting movies. The offer there was poor (and last time I checked it was even worse), so there was really no point in spending money and rent a movie when I could spend the less drinking beer, hanging out, or even acting like a potato couch and seeing silly TV shows. When I moved to Coimbra all was different. Specially in my first years there, I was quite addicted in cultural stuff: almost every day I had a concert to see, a theatre play to attend, and exposition to watch, a movie to see. I spent lots of money in one of the cinema's there, where I usually watched all the movies that were shown in that venue. Also, I used to attend to every thing that was going on the Academic Theatre (TAGV): mainly movies, plays or concerts. And I also started renting movies, specially when with friends: we would get a couple of movies, crash in someone's house, and do a "movie party". Life started getting busier and busier, but it wasn't uncommon to see me browsing in Tintarella's shelves, since that particular movies rental store had a quite nice stock of recent and good alternative movies, European cinema and science fiction, and a catchy section with weekly highlights. In my latest years in Coimbra, sometimes I was found in the middle of the night with a couple of friends on the multimedia room of one University department, watching a just-rented movie.

Then I came to the big city of Lisbon, and I never rented a movie again. Do you think it is my fault? First I lived in Carnaxide, now I really live in Lisbon. I know where a/the movies rental store in Carnaxide is: I went there exactly three times, sold there used CDs, bought there one second-hand CD, and their movies selection was... unattractive. I live in "real Lisbon" for almost three years now. And I never saw a movies rental shop.

Now, do you really think that it is my fault that I never rented a movie anymore? Is it caused by piracy? No way. I don't rent movies because I don't have the habit of doing so, I don't know any rental store and I don't feel any urge of finding one. If you take into account that I used to be a client of that kind of stores, their "industry" lost a client. They did not know how to keep me. They failed as business people. They did a bad job. They are doing a bad job. They can throw rocks to piracy, freedom, rights, or anything they like. They might even get the chance to implement any laws and regulations they dream of. They will never have a successful business until they realise and admit their flaws and mistakes. Hurting people is not a way of making them your clients. Slowly, really slowly, the music industry is starting to learn their lesson. Movies rental businesses should too.

50.000 tracks played on Last.fm

2008-11-17T20:12:00.000Z

As you can see on the screenshot (click to enlarge), I've been on Last.fm for more than two years, and today I've reached the 50000 played tracks. Last.fm doesn't really represent what I listen: lot of the time when I'm at work I listen to what Last.fm plays to me (which limits the choice), and when I'm at home, I'm usually listening to things that will not end scrobbled: CDs, Vinyls or Cassettes. Still, this is probably the biggest (public) data available of what kind of music I dig, and it's pretty cool that I've reached 50K: now you can give some credit to what those numbers show.

So, in a sort of way to celebrate the 50K mark, here's my own analysis of the numbers and graphics:

Merankorii is by far the most listened band, which should come with no surprise. Actually, for years now my "alarm clock" is an at firing up mplayer and playing a Merankorii album (nowadays the upcoming one), so I actually listen to a lot more Merankorii than what you can see on Last.fm. What can I say? I am a fan of my own work, or else I wouldn't bother doing it...
Tenhi is in 2nd and Empyrium in 4th, and I really love both this neofolk bands and have the complete discography of both. But if I had to choose between one of the two, Empyrium would have to be the choice, not Tenhi. I don't know if I really listen more Tenhi than Empyrium (what I know, tho, is that their CDs spin a lot in my CD player, so the numbers should also be bigger on those two), but I guess that this result is caused by the fact that Last.fm has Tenhi musics and plays them to me, while it doesn't have Empyrium tracks.
Antimatter at number two, Ashram at number five. These two are also bands of which I have the whole discography. They are of two completely different genres so I don't really compare the both, but the reason why Antimatter is ahead of Ashram is, probably, because they four releases, instead of the "one demo and two albums" from Ashram. I recommend both bands: check Antimatter if you like Acoustic stuff, check Ashram if you're into neoclassical.
DVAR is the weirdest band. Ever. DVAR is, supposedly, made by two Russian guys, from Moscow. Let me quote some of their biography on Last.fm: "The music was presented to them by a strange creature named Dvar. All music of the band is devoted to him and inspired by him. Members of the band claim not to create their own music, but rather being mediums of what they have heard. Lyrics, according to them, are performed in Enochian language." The only people I know that know who is behind DVAR are the musicians of another musical project "Caprice"...

And, well, I could keep on and write a book out of what I listen, but that would be boring, right? Maybe when I reach 100000 scrobbles I'll do this again, and compare screenshots...

If you're curious and want to check out one of this bands or my Last.fm profile, here's the link. You can also listen to what I listen.

"Social DRM" is Anti-Social

2008-11-12T10:57:00.001Z

In February 2007, right after Steve Jobs claiming to the world that he was Anti-DRM and that the fault of him having DRM in iTunes was that of the majors (which is nothing but a bunch of crap, but I digress), Adobe's Bill McCoy wrote in his blog about his vision of DRM, acting as agreeing with Steve Jobs. His ridiculous arguments leaded to a new concept: "Social DRM". I ditched the whole absurd idea and almost forgot about it. Until now.

It seems that there are lots of people thinking that "Social DRM" is a bright idea. Actually, I've seeing the term in my readings more, so I decided not to ignore the issue anymore, and write a quick post about why "Social DRM" is a really bad idea.

First, getting this straight: I really think that "Social DRM" is less bad than "traditional DRM", mostly because it isn't DRM at all. Yet, being less bad doesn't mean it is good, to the point of making me state that, like I don't buy DRM'd stuff, I wouldn't buy nothing with "Social DRM".

What is "Social DRM"? Well, nothing more than watermarking. Basicly, McCoy is trying to think of DRM on e-books, and his "idea" is to have a "Social DRM" that is in fact a mark in every page on the ebook, make it header or footer, stating something like "this book is for the exclusive use of [insert purchaser's name here]". Why is it bad?

Well, McCoy certainly choose the name "Social DRM" because he understands the "social" need consumers need to have in their "content". A book (or an album, or a movie) is social, because if you read and like it you want to share it, to recommend it to your friends, you're going to cite it on your blog, you'll make references to it in your day-by-day... you'll use it as a social tool. So, he [tries to] argue, when watermarking the book instead of making it have DRM, you're not taking the social part of having the book out of it. It is social because it isn't anti-social. But he's wrong.

Let me make a small and quick list of social things I can do with my books:

I can borrow it;

I can leave it on my desk and next time I know Paula is reading it;

I can give it;

I can sell it;

I can trade it (bookcrossing-style);

I can leave it on the bus bench after reading it;

I can let it be used by everyone in the office;

Now, how many of this social things I can do with your "social DRM"? I can't borrow it, 'cause you're not "Marcos Marado", I can't let Paula wander around with it on her laptop, she's not "Marcos Marado" either; I can't give, sell or trade it, which means that if I abandon it (or loose it!) in my flash disk on the bus, I might get in trouble, 'cause you aren't me. Does this sound social to you? To me, like "tradicional DRM", this sounds exactly like "I'm having my freedoms removed".

Thanks but no, thanks, I'm too social to buy anti-social "Social DRM" stuff.

2008-11-11T20:12:00.001Z

There are many many things I want to say, and not that much time. My mental list of "things to blog", each promising an huge post, makes me think that maybe -- just maybe -- most of those blog posts are never going to be written. So, for now, I'm writing you a little telegram, telling only some things, and quickly.

The first, and obvious, is to tell you I'm going to marry soon. That's right: we knew we would going to do it for a long time, but it was only while celebrating her birthday that I did the actual move of asking her. As my friendfeed followers noticed, or her blog readers, she said "Yes". I'm really happy, but there are lots of things to do now: people still don't get married over the Internet, at least in Portugal ;-) Thanks a lot to those who gave us "congratulations" messages, I know I didn't replied to most of you... bear with me.

After a quick talk on Friendfeed between me and Melo, he decided to write Rasputine. Rasputine (or Ras, as Corto Maltese called him) is a generic Moo/MUD/Talker-to-XMPP gateway. You add a buddy to your roster and then you can use it to connect to that world. That means that now, a couple of days later, you can use Jabber to connect to several services, including Selva (add selva@rasputine.simplicidade.org, Second Life (via SLTalker, add sltalker@rasputine.simplicidade.org), Portugal Virtual (add pv@rasputine.simplicidade.org) or MOOsaico (add moosaico@rasputine.simplicidade.org). This also means that I'm now feeling back the urge to make SLTalker a lot more useful (and less buggy) than it is at the moment. It is being completely rewritten, using now libsecondlife 0.5.0.

I'm returning to have a good reading rhythm. So, I've been reading Cory Doctorow's books (he's also now freshly married, congratulations!), finaly got into the mood of getting and reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (you know when you know that you will read and like a book, and you're so certain of it that you just keep postponing it? I've been doing that with this book for years...), Satrapi's Embroideries, some more SciFi, some Fantasy, some Manga, some essays... Well, a lot of stuff, but still not as much as I wanted to. Regarding to Cory's books, I have a funny thing to tell: despite all his books being freely available to download on his website, with a Creative Commons license, I've been buying and reading them in the physical book format (and reading a lot of his not-in-books essays in my mobile phone). Well, with "Overclocked" I stumbled into a problem: the book had 16 pages missing!. Frustrating, huh? Well, not that much: thanks to Creative Commons, I just picked up my cellphone and in less than two minutes I was reading what was supposed to be in those 16 pages. See one more case on which Creative Commons is a good idea? ;-)

Oh, speaking of Creative Commons: to celebrate their fund-raising campaign, Creative Commons has released "A Shared Culture", a cool short video by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan, explaining very well why Creative Commons is important. Since it is in English, without translations, and I wanted to write about Creative Commons in one of my twice-a-week column at "Programas Livres", a Portuguese web publication, I ended up doing a free translation and adaptation, in both text and audio formats.

And... well, I told you, I have lot's of stuff to talk about, but for now, this is it. If you want to keep more updated than this, consider following my Friendfeed.

MUD is 30: happy birthday!

2008-10-20T21:33:00.000+01:00

This blog post is going to be so short that it is the kind if things that I usually only talk about on FriendFeed, but end up not blogging about. But then, reading the few things about the issue that were written, and feeling the overall tone, I decided that, even if small (due to my own time constraints, the theme is good enough to write a book), this is a blog post I had to write.

MUD is 30 years old today. What is MUD? Why is this an important theme? Well, MUD is the percursor and the father of Virtual Worlds and MMO's. Without MUD, there would be no Selva, no WoW, no Second Life. But more than historical influence, MUDs really created the way Virtual Worlds are architectured today.

So, happy birthday!

The broken Web

2008-09-29T21:37:00.000+01:00

I have several computers, almost all of the time I'm using one (or several) or three: an HP laptop that with a 1024x768 resolution, the EEE PC 701 with a 800x480 resolution, and finally my BlackBerry 8100 and its way smaller screen. I use them to do everything I use computers for, including surfing the web. The experience is far from perfect, and here are some reasons why:

The web is about content, not displays

Please stop that really old mantra of "nobody uses 1024x768 anymore". I've been listening to that for a while, even if the biggest resolution I have on this three devices is exactly that one. Also, the argument isn't new: I remember at least the "nobody uses 640x480" and the "nobody uses 600x800" arguments, and I'm pretty sure that the thing didn't start there, but in other arguments like "nobody sees only 80 columns anymore". The biggest mistake here isn't to think that nobody uses 1024 while I still do. Nor trying to predict the smallest resolution out there. The mistake here is that the web is about content, not displays. Regardless of what you might think or want, a website is meant to be read by whoever crosses with it, using whatever device he's using. Your website must be visible, readable and usable by every device, with every resolution. It's not hard, and it doesn't mean you should ditch planning your website layout and make it into your CSS files. On the contrary, it means that you should treat content as content and put it in the document layer, presentation as presentation and put it in the presentation layer. But it also means that your presentation can't be made in a "if users are reading this in a 1024 screen", or "if users are reading this in a mobile device", but instead, "if users are reading a paragraph", "if users are reading a caption"...

One Web

Like I said in the previous item, your website should be platform-agnostic. But that doesn't only mean that I should read your website well in every resolution, it means that I should be able to read your website with every browser, in every device. One web, several ways of reaching it. So, remember this next time you're thinking about making a mobile version of your website: if you're planning on do it, you already did it wrong. See, your website should be readable everywhere. That means that if your website is well made, I can read it well in my mobile device without the need of going to a mobile version of it. On the other hand, if you're making me go to another website -- a mobile version -- you're not only stopping me of seeing the website I want to see, giving me a trimmed-down version of the real thing, you're actually making me see another webiste, with all the implications that might have. Remember, if your website doesn't look good in a mobile device in the first place, you already did something wrong...

The Web is The Web

The Web is The Web: nothing more. It's made of standards, composed by a set of documents written in a certain language. You have HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, several formats for images and other objects... and that's it. The Web is just that. The web isn't made of "plugins" or "third-party applications". The web is made to be seen by a browser - any browser. So remember: if you have, for instance, flash in your website, the content must be 100% acessible by a browser without a Flash plugin. I'm serious: it's not my fault if I can't see your website in my mobile phone just because it full of flash. You chose to use a plugin that isn't available to every browser, in every platform, so you have to give an alternative for those visiting your website without that plugin. Oh, and spare me that "you don't have flash, get it here" messages, because you're just making me doing a couple of steps and going to another website where they'll tell me "your platform isn't supported". It's not my fault as a web user, and it's not their fault as a plugin provider: it's your fault as a content publisher.

What else?

There are tons of other things in the web that makes it as broken as it nowadays is. But for now, please think about this three. I bet that with those solved, my web experience would get a lot better.

Music Media - are physical formats dieing?

2008-08-28T15:45:00.001+01:00

I guess that there are plenty of ways I could use to talk about this, and a lot of things I could say about it. So, since this comes as a reflection of two things that happened during my vacations, I'll just tell you about those two, talk only a little about my reflections about it... and let you do your own thinking.

The first one is about Stereo 8. What's in the picture is - for those that don't know - a Stereo 8 cartridge. Before the massification of the Cassette Tape, this was what people used to listen as a more portable (yet inferior) media for recorded music. After the event of massification of the use of cassettes, Stereo 8 lost most of their fans, with exceptions of truck drivers (most of their vehicles came with an 8-track player) and in some less developed countries. This one is mine, one of the two only 8-track I have that still play. The curious fact about it is that, for me, this is the best Tango album I ever listened to. In fact, I generally don't like Tango, but I really dig this album, and during vacations spent quite a few hours listening to it while playing Scrabble with Paula. Unlike the other 8-track cartridge I own, this one was never released in any other format. That means that if I want to listen to it, I must do it from the original source (well, maybe next time I go to Lamego I'll try to rip it to another format). This music is virtually lost: not only I don't believe there are that many 8-track listeners out there, but the probability they have this one, and still playable, is pretty much none. The format is so dead, that each time I tell somebody that the last 8-track released I know of was in 2004 (even if I suspect that if I dig enough I'll find that some crazy band released one more recently), their reaction is generally disbelief: they expected it was in the eighties. So, what happens if you want this music? Nothing. You simply can't have it. Of course it would done absolutely no harm if I made a copy and give it to you, but that would be illegal, this isn't in Public Domain. And since it only enters in Public Domain 70 years after its authors die, we both will be dead or deaf by then... you'll just have to believe this is good music. I don't really think that 70 years after-death for getting music into Public Domain makes any sense, but unfortunately EU is thinking in extending it even more...

The other one is about one music store in Lamego: Brincodisco. I had a quite long and interesting chat with its owner (that was already owner of that place even before I was born, my brother and older sister used to buy there their records...), and there were lots of things in that chat and my visit to the store that made me think in several things - so I'll probably end up talking about that store several times in the future. But, for now, the thing that made me enter into the store the most (well, besides being a music store and me being on vacations): there were several cassette tapes exposed there. But the shock was when I entered: my estimation is that the store sells (more or less) 40% CDs, 35% Vinyl records and 25% cassette tapes. That's right: one quarter of the items selling there are cassette tapes. How do you take this piece of information, when the trend nowadays is saying that all the physical formats are dead but CD, that is dying?

Reality check, please: physical formats are never going to die, and CDs and Vinyls have decades in front of them, before they disappear. You might not like this, you might want to ignore this when you make your business, prediction or whatever you do, but if confronted with this, you need to realize that, even if a niche, the physical music market is here to stay. And I'm glad.

Got myself an Eee PC 701

2008-08-23T16:05:00.001+01:00

I'm back from my vacations, and there's lots of stuff I want (and will) blog about. But this one had to be now: I got myself a new Eee PC! Well, as a matter of fact both me and Paula wanted an Eee PC, so this one is from and for us both (even if the possibility of getting another one was already discussed). As you might have noticed thanks to the previous blog posts I made about ASUS EEE PC, which made several people think I already had one, I really fancy this cute little laptoy. I only have it for a couple of hours, and the time with it is between me and Paula, so I still didn't have the time to play with it as much as I wanted to: I built a backup USB stick and a backup of the system as it was, fiddled a little with settings and preferences, played with some of the software it has (which includes playing OpenArena and hedgewars O:-)), and got it connected to the internet via Kanguru (3G service). And I had to do this blog post using it, the same as I did when I got my blackberry phone :-)

The next step is already decided: install Debian here!

And for those wanting pictures... Well, I'm sure that either me or Paula will be uploading some of those in the near future :-)

How to use your blackberry as a modem in Debian

2008-08-16T18:33:00.011+01:00

[ATENTION: this blog post was updated!]

After aquiring a BlackBerry cellphone, I wanted to use it as a modem for my laptop, running Debian. I still didn't figure how to use it via bluetooth, but here's how to do it via USB:

I recommend you read all this procedure before starting

Install barry (so you can use the cellphone via USB, this makes it chargeable too

Install XmBlackBerry

connect your mobile phone to your computer, via USB

sudo XmBlackBerry

clicking in the options menu you'll see in the stderr (console where you
run this app) a /dev/pts/something , which is your GPRS device

click "connect" and see if your phone tells you that you're connected to the desktop

sudo vi /etc/chatscripts/blackberry :


ABORT BUSY ABORT ‘NO CARRIER’ ABORT VOICE ABORT ‘NO DIALTONE’ ABORT ‘NO DIAL TONE’ ABORT ‘NO ANSWER’ ABORT DELAYED ABORT ERROR
SAY “Initializing\n”
” ATZ
SAY "ATE\n"
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","wap.voicestream.com"'
OK 'AT'OK 'ATDT*99***1#'
SAY "Dialing\n"

(change "device" here) sudo vi /etc/ppp/peers/blackberry


debug debug debug
nodetach
/dev/pts/device
115200
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/chatscripts/blackberry"
nomultilink
defaultroute
noipdefault
ipcp-restart 7
ipcp-accept-local
ipcp-accept-remote
lcp-echo-interval 0
lcp-echo-failure 999
modem
noauth
nocrtscts
noipdefault
novj 
usepeerdns
user ""
password ""

sudo pppd call blackberry

And you're on!

Yeah, but how to install XmBlackBerry?

Here are the steps to install XmBlackBerry:

* get and install libmotif 2.3.0 debian packages here
* aptitude install xaw3dg-dev xorg-dev x11proto-print-dev autoconf libtool libopensync-dev libxp-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libreadline5-dev
* As root, run
ln -s /usr/include/X11/Xaw3d /usr/include/X11/Xaw
* Install Xlt (tested with 13.0.13): get it here, untar it and, in its directory...
*


./configure --with-motif-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib --prefix=/usr
make && make install

* Install XmBlackBerry:


cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@xmblackberry.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmblackberry co XmBlackBerry
cd XmBlackBerry/
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@libusb.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/libusb co libusb
cd libusb
make && make install
cd ..
./CVSMake
./configure --enable-maintainer-mode --disable-shared --with-motif-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
make
sudo make install
sudo ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.4 /usr/lib/libXm.so.4

And how to install Barry?

You distro should have packages for it (most have). If not...

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@barry.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/barry login 
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@barry.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/barry co -P barry
cd barrysh 
buildgen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
sudo cp udev/*b* /etc/udev/rules.d/.

Vacations

2008-08-06T16:42:00.000+01:00

I'm having a half a month vacations, and the plans were simply to rest. Went from Lisbon to Coimbra, and from there to Lamego, to show the city to Paula. We've seen some things already, like the castle, the now restaurated theatre (where we went to a piano concert from the first international piano festival of Lamego), the museum...

I already have my new cellphone, which I'm using to blog, and now that I'm used to BlackBerry's qwerty keyboard I'm really happy with the device, and I must say that using it to blog is quite a joyful experience.

But now, enough: I have good weather, a nice view, good cold beer to drink and a newspaper to read. See you!

Busy Times

2008-07-23T22:55:00.000+01:00

My "busy times" continue, and I don't expect to recover from my "blog posts scarcity" in the next following months: I'll have some vacations next month, but I intend to use those days to rest, and avoid using a computer... Of course, you can keep track of what I've been doing via FriendFeed, a tool I'm now addicted to, to the point of having replaced my regular RSS reader by it. But there are still some news I want to talk about:

There's a new ARG comming out, and I'm eager to try it, play it or at least keep track of it. I'm talking about Deleted: The Game - an ARG centered in a female vlog'er that moved to NYC and met a guy that is funding a startup that aims to protect its costumers from identity theft... Seems realy fun.

There's a new DNS flaw out there, so if you're a system administrator and have to maintain some DNS servers, you must check it out. It's grave, and you most probably are affected.

Some music-related news: a piece on a particular music retailer, that sells music for USA prisions, shows the real impact new technologies have on the music market, since this guy doesn't have any of those problems. Curious how he sells more Cassettes than CDs, and how his major problem nowadays is the fact that less stuff is released in this format.

After a discussion on a private mailing list about the fact that it is almost impossible to buy a computer without having to buy Windows, even if you don't want it (and if it is right or wrong, if it should be considered bundling or not, and if governments should put a hand on the issue or let markets work for themselves), a new story about someone buying a laptop and then forcing the vendor to return the software money appeared. This time it was an HP laptop with Windows Vista, which wasn't used by the buying since he didn't agreed with its User Agreement.

Regarding to events, I'm planning to go to Aveiro for DebianDayPT 2008, then to Coimbra for BarCamp Portugal 2008, and then to Amsterdam in September to attend to IBC 2008. I'll probably have to miss SHiFT 2008 here in Lisbon in October, but it promises to be a hell of a conference, and you should check it out.

NATO has included ODF in its list of mandatory standards to promote interoperability. NATO's standards list includes RTF, XML, but not OOXML, Microsoft's direct competitor to ODF, which is currently undergoing a controversial ISO certification process. Observers say that the Dutch Defence Ministry threw its weight behind ODF. The public sector in the Netherlands expressly supports open standards and open source.

Against experts' recommendations, against innovation, fairness, artists and consumers, EU decided that copyright should be extended to 95 years after death. This is still no final decision, and there's a lot of work to do in order to prevent this.

Finaly, the European directive I called "Big Brother directive" back in 2005, was now implemented in Portugal, making it the second European country (after Sweden) to implement it. Now, every Portuguese "comunication service" provider has three months to prepare everything to comply with the law and start spy and logging their costumers comunications. Or switch countries.

Welcome to Equal Dreams, the fair music market

2008-07-21T15:11:00.010+01:00

Equal Dreams is a platform which enables direct sales of digital music from right holders to consumers as well as easy communication and co-operation between artists and audience. Sales proceeds can be automatically distributed to right holders (musicians, composers, producers, record labels) using the royalty administration system built into the service. By using Equal Share feature an artist may seek funding for a music production project. In this case artist sells limited economic rights of the pre-ordered music to the audience meaning that a customer making Equal Share pre-order earns royalty from the sales of the music. In Equal Dreams artists and their audience may also join their forces for a good cause - Equal Aid.

After their press release, and after trying the beta version myself, I decided to contact them and make a couple of questions. Here are them, along with the answers they kindly provided.

Last year you decided to create Equal Dreams, and now you're launching it. What's the background? What made you create this company, and what are your goals?

Few years ago I got interested in following the development in music business. It was really interesting to read and learn about different services, opinions and visions. I built Equal Dreams concept together with musicians Heidi Kärkkäinen (my sister) and Anders Uddeskog in the beginning of 2007 from the scattered ideas I had created in my free time. We were also fortunate to find great business partners who got excited about our idea, and have helped to bring Equal Dreams from concept to reality.

Our goal is to provide musicians the best music service in the World. We wish to offer musicians and their audience new and equal opportunities to create and enjoy music together.

EqualDreams offers three different (yet integrated) services: Equal Dreams online store, Equal Share, and Equal Aid. I find it curious, since it's the first music 2.0 service I see that tries to bundle three different things: one "fair" music store, one way of letting artists have their albums crowdfunded, and one way of helping charity organizations. What made you try to achieve this three goals in one strike? Aren't you afraid that your service might turn-down those artists looking for just one or two of the three services you provide?

There are certainly many good services that are specialized on one topic. However, I believe that there is also a need for a service that can combine fluently, simply and reliably the most important features from the artist point of view. As you pointed out, we see our services not as separate, but integrated, and mutually supportive; our underlying “key word”, fairness, encompasses all these three areas. All artists, whether they are starting out and have just written their first song, or are old timers with ten albums, are welcome to open their own store and price their music. Equal Share enables especially beginning artists to start their careers, and hopefully create closer relationship with their fans. With Equal Aid the artists can support charitable causes together with their fans.

We hope that we can provide artists with the set of tools that really makes their life easier when there are lot of changes taking place in the music business. Artists can use these tools in ways that fit their particular situation.

Equal Share (that, I must confess, is the most attractive of your three services) competes with other services in the crowdfunding music world, like SellABand or SliceThePie. Why should an artist go for Equal Share and not those other services?

Compared to the other services Equal Share provides the artists with more flexibility in defining what he or she is actually selling to the audience and for what price; first of all, there are no pre-set target goals, but the artists can define their own funding needs; after all the quality of the produced music does not necessarily correlate with the amount of money spend in the project. Nowadays this is true more than ever as the prices of digital recording equipment have come down so drastically. Artist could also use Equal Share together with a record label/producer to gather a partial funding for the production. Secondly, the co-funding, which works with a pre-order concept, can be flexibly assigned to even just one song, and the pre-order price can be set as low as 0.50 EUR. We think this is more attractive from the customer’s point of view than being prescribed to invest tens of euros. Fans can be updated about the progress of the production project using the internal messaging system in the Service.

Why do you believe that crowdfunding can work regarding to music?

I think being able to participate in production of music, especially if it is together with artists one likes, is very appealing – this represents a new way of being a fan; instead of admiring afar people are now able to play a part in making new music. Equal Share is about experience and co-operation - being closer to the artist.

What other things people might expect from you? Are your plans consolidating the business you're launching now, or keep investing on new ideas and business models?

Our vision is to offer the best possible services for artists, and we intend to work hard to meet that goal. So, customers certainly can expect new ideas to be implemented. Of course we welcome feedback from our customers in order to keep us on right track.

All your business models have the base of having people paying for music. In a scenario where we have more and more people wanting to experience music, but giving less value to recorded music, specially digital, aren't you afraid that people simply don't pay for music, and choose to spend their time downloading free stuff instead of being your costumers?

Piracy has been treated as a major threat towards music industry. However, we see this is a question of values and attitudes, and believe there is a strong tendency to pay for music instead of acquiring it without charge if this supports the artist.

People are ready to pay for good experiences and we believe that artists can offer good and new experiences to their customers by using our service. Equal Dreams will be able to offer consumers an access to music by new artists that may not be available anywhere else.

In our business model our success is dependent on the artists’ success. I think it is a healthy starting point for our service business, and it gives us a humble attitude towards our customers.

Where do you think the music industry is heading too? Some people think we're in the verge of living a process of creative destruction, some think that the music industry is doomed, while others think that things were never better than today. What are your thoughts?

I think Internet as a new technology has brought great new possibilities for music business as any other business. Eventually people will find and learn new ways to organize their work by using new technology. I don't believe in a process of creative destruction at all. An artist will always want to create art - business models or copyright laws has little to do with that fact.

Any final words for our readers, artists or music lovers?

I hope you will find our service fun and exciting. We wish to hear about you and get your feedback on how to make Equal Dreams even better.

Are you European? It's urgent, Europe needs you

2008-07-04T22:58:00.000+01:00

There is a very important EU vote taking place on July 7th on some amendments to telecommunications legislation that threaten to sneak in a number of catastrophic measures:

European Internet users could be blocked from lawful activities by mandatory spyware, in the interests of their security. The right to use free software for internet access would therefore not be assured anymore. The neutrality of the Internet is also directly attacked, as is the principle that technical intermediaries have no obligation to prior surveillance of contents. Other amendments will de facto enable administrative authorities to obligate ISPs to work with content producers and rights-holders' private police, including the sending of intimidating messages, with no judicial or regulatory oversight.
These measure goes further than the French "graduated response" project, which has been subject to widespread opposition, including by the European Parliament on April 10th. That is undoubtedly why those amendments have turned up on early july, and why those drafting them use subtle rhetoric and crossed-references to make the overall text harder to understand (more than 800 amendements on 5 directives were tabled).

This is really serious: I urge you if you possibly can to write to your MEP. You can do it using the fab WriteToThem service, which makes it as easy as can be. Make sure it gets to them before July 7th (yes, it's tight – that's how sneaky they've been).

If you don't know what to write, here's a great letter you can use as a template.

Tomorrow, NeoFolk in Portugal

2008-07-04T16:30:00.001+01:00

First a conference by Ian Read, then a concert with Fire + Ice, Orplid, Barditus and Àrnica. Tomorrow Portugal is Looking for Europe.

If you're going, feel free to talk with me there, and to tell the world you're going.

HOWTO install HedgeWars (Worms clone) in an EEE PC

2008-07-03T11:27:00.004+01:00

HedgeWars is a "Worms" clone and a pretty cool game. They put it this way:

Hedgewars, it's a Blast! This is the funniest and most addictive game you'll ever play - hilarious fun that you can enjoy anywhere, anytime. Hedgewars is a turn based strategy game but the real buzz is from watching the devastation caused by those pesky hedgehogs with those fantastic weapons - sneaky little blighters with a bad attitude!

By popular demand, here's a (quick and simple) HOW TO of how to install this game on an EEE PC (where it runs awesomely):

Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list, and add this line in that file:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free

In a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T to open it) write:sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install hedgewars
Edit once again the /etc/apt/sources.list file and remove the new entry, so your system ends up as it was before
in the terminal write sudo apt-get update to make your changes in the sources list being in effect.
Now you have the game installed. To run it, in a terminal write hedgewars. To play it well, you'll have to set it up to fullscreen mode.

There you go: have a nice gaming!

Installing Second Life on an EEE PC

2008-06-23T13:52:00.004+01:00

I've been playing with an EEE PC lately. This 299€ (in Portugal) GNU/Linux ASUS laptop is awsome, and I'm really happy that ASUS did it. They did some mistakes, like using Xandros Server 2.0 as base for their distro, making me think, for instance, that if I had one of these I would replace their Operating System with something like Debian Eee PC, eeexubuntu or even eeedora. I might write about my thoughts on EEE PC later, but for now, a quick HOWTO (because I think this isn't documented nowhere) on installing Second Life on EEE PC.

HOWTO Install Second Life on an EEE PC:

edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change DefaultColorDepth 16 to DefaultColorDepth 24
restart your X (press control+alt+backspace, for instance)

edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add this lines:


deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/pub/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://apt.byteme.org.uk/apt/ unstable main

in a terminal (CTRL+ALT+t) write sudo aptitude update && aptitude install slviewer
Remove the added lines on /etc/apt/sources.list and in the terminal run aptitude update to go back to the state you were
Your Second Life is now installed. To run it write slviewer in a terminal.

Regarding to using Second Life itself, you'll notice that the windowed view assumes a bigger resolution than the one you have, so I recommend you to start by going to the options, changing the ratio scale and remove the windowed mode. Et voilá, you're on Second Life!

Blogging in Portuguese

2008-06-22T19:58:00.000+01:00

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know by now that I'm involved in several projects that are cutting my time to blog. While some of you would prefer the regular blogging I have done in the past, I still think that there are things that should be talked and there are things that should be done. In order to make both, for now at least, the frequency of my blogging must be low as it has been in the last couple of months, and I'm glad that it is that way, because I am really getting things done. So, some of you chose to not only follow my blogging here, but also follow my a lot more frequent microblogging (on FriendFeed). Those that follow me that way might have noticed by now that I'm now also blogging in another place, and in another language.

From yesterday, I started writting a bi-weekly column in "Programas Livres" (translate to "Free Programs"), where I talk about Digital Rights. So, if you know Portuguese, you might want to start reading my column there (here's the RSS feed). Without promises, I expect to translate those articles (at least some of them) and post them here.

Motorola no more

2008-06-16T23:29:00.000+01:00

If you know me for some time, you'll know that I am, or used to be, a Motorola fan on cellphones. The first time I bought a Motorola cellphone the choice was easy: I wanted a cellphone from a company that wasn't lobbying in Europe for the adoption of Software Patents, which discarded the chance of Siemens mobile phones, which was what I was used to use, despite not being really fond of them. Buying my C650 was a really cool choice: I really liked that cellphone, and it was that cellphone that made me think more about cellphones as mobile devices - mobile computers. At the end of 2005 the phone was getting ill, and in December it made me really pissed off. I decided that C650 was older than it should, and that I should put it to rest. Sonaecom (where I work) helped that decision, deciding to give me a cellphone. That time the choice was not so easy, but I knew I wanted a Motorola. I wanted to choose one inside my budget, and E1 was the only one with a music player, so I quickly went for it, replacing both my C650 and my portable music player. It was also a good bet: I both liked the cellphone and the company that made it, with their strong relationship with Open Source et al... and then using it as a modem via bluetooth made it an important piece of my digital life.

With all the hype around iPhone (curious this post being today, after an afternoon talking about this exactly), I even wrote about why, for me, E1 is better than the iPhone. Heck, I'll say it again: if E1 was from company A, and iPhone also was from company A, where A is a company I like, I would choose E1 over the iPhone.

Last March I decided that I should replace my E1 phone, and, once again, the choice was being made around several Motorola models. Other things stepped in the way of choosing one (basicly I've been dedicating more time in this blog - which is almost abandoned - than to choose and order a new phone), so, until today, the choice was postponed, with thoughts going to V3xx or K3.

But today... I read at Last100 that Motorola launched an online store, "selling" both music and movies for cellphones... crippled with DRM. Well, as you might already know by now, I don't support companies that like to spit on their costumers freedom. After this years, my relationship with Motorola as a cellphone costumer is now over.

So, I'm still searching for a new cellphone. The decision about the vendor is already made: it will be a Blackberry. I only have now to decide which one: Blackberry 8100 or the more powerful Blackberry 8800. Oh, and for those talking about the iPhone, here's already why BlackBerry is better than the iPhone, even the 2nd version of it ;-)

Document standards: there can be only one?

2008-06-12T19:06:00.003+01:00

The Inquirer is running a story telling that Brydon, from ISO, told them that

"Naturally, its desirable that there is only one international standard. The market seems to be going for two. But eventually one international standard will be listed."

Considering that there is already one document standard, ODF, and that OOXML is not a standard, is there that much to say? Obivously the right conclusion for this whole thread is that ISO should say NO to OOXML as an ISO standard, and the worldwide focus (including that of Microsoft) should be into making ODF better. Looking to what already happened in the last few years regarding to OOXML this is improbable: Microsoft is surely going to apply their unethical tatics to ruin the digital documents world...

OOXML is NOT a standard

2008-06-11T21:06:00.002+01:00

I don't usually do this, but this time, here it goes: I'm quoting an entire press release, this time from ISO:

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

In accordance with the ISO/IEC rules governing the work of their joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, the appeals are currently being considered by the ISO Secretary-General and the IEC General Secretary who, within a period of 30 days (to the end of June), and following whatever consultations they judge appropriate, are required to submit the appeals, with their comments, to the ISO Technical Management Board and the IEC Standardization Management Board.

The two management boards will then decide whether the appeals should be further processed or not. If they decide in favour of proceeding, the chairmen of the two boards are required to establish a conciliation panel which will attempt to resolve the appeals. The process could take several months.

According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. Therefore, the decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known.

This, in other words, means that OOXML is NOT a standard.

Bill Gates

2008-06-01T00:10:00.000+01:00

Disliking Microsoft for years, I heard countless times sentences like "you might not like Microsoft, but you'll have to admit that Bill Gates is a genious". I don't agree. As a matter of fact, I wholeheartedly disagree. Usually, my reply is something like "I don't think Bill Gates is a genious, I think he's an asshole". Hey - it's my oppinion and its worth what is worth, but I really think he is an asshole. And more.

Reading a Portuguese newspaper, there was an article about Bill Gates, with three quotes from him. Two of them just support my oppinion. Let me show you...

Bill Gates, the asshole:

«If you can't do it good, at least do it looking good»

Bill Gates, the lunatic:

«There are people that dislike capitalism and there are people that don't like PC's. But there's no one that likes PC's and that don't like Microsoft»

(Sentences were in Portuguese, translation to English by me, so these might not be ipsis verbis. Also, emphasis mine.)

Now, if you know something about computers, you see the obvious flaws of this sentences.

Worse than putting some piece of bad software on the streets, if decieving your costumers by lieing and telling that piece of crap is not only good, but awsome. This is common practice of Microsoft, and one of the most criticised things on them. Which leads me to the second sentence: not only I myself like PC's and abhor Microsoft, but also I'm not alone, far from it. Try, for instance, go to a search engine (one that isn't owned by Microsoft, please) and search for "Microsoft sucks".

The Player of Games

2008-05-18T19:13:00.000+01:00

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.

The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

--- in "The Player of Games", Iain M. Banks

Great way of saying it. This is a book I recommend, not only for those that like SciFi, but also for those curious about gaming, game theory, or "different" social/cultural/political scenarios.

Talking about "games like life", I've been playing for quite a while an interesting web-based game called "eRepublik", and Ihave some invites, so if you want one just drop me a line. I hope I'll manage to write an extensive article about this game, but for now I'll just sum it up: A new world, with social issues, political issues, and virtually complete freedom to evolve. Here, you can be a polititian, owner of your company or employee, you have to take care of your wellness, don't forget to have food to eat, and - if you want - try to make the world a better place. Things evolve quite fast there, we're in the verge of "living" the first World War, Portugal is a fascist, almost dictatorial country, Pakistan aims to be the "worldwide country" and subject everyone to their religion, one USA state wants to be independent, India was conquered... Why don't you try out and see for yourself?

The SSH/SSL vulnerability: what you should know

2008-05-15T16:20:00.001+01:00

I wasn't going to post about this, but it seems that, for my own sanity, I must. As you might know by now, a Debian Security Advisory came out, talking about a problem that affected the OpenSSL package, not only for Debian but for its derivatives too, like Ubuntu.

My first two remarks, and probably the most important ones for my thoughts about this issue:

If what you know about this issue is what you read on Slashdot, YOU'RE WRONG. Even the news itself is wrong, and the comments are clueless, written by people that don't know shit about what are they talking about. Worse than useless, that story on /. is disinformative.
If you think that this issue only affects users of Debian and Debian-derivatives, think twice. Any Linux/Unix/*BSD system is vulnerable that grants access to a key that was generated on an affected Debian or Ubuntu system. Erich has a simple yet good explanation on why.

Now, my stand on the issue: if you really feel the need to mock, criticize or otherwise comment about this issue, make yourself and me a favour, and avoid making a fool of yourself. In other words, find out what really happened, what is this all about and make your own oppinion based on facts, instead of just falling into the absurdity that spreaded over, saying silly stuff like "Debian does not contribute to upstream" (what a joke, did you ever read the Debian Social Contract?), or "Debian shouldn't make security fixes". As a matter of fact, John Goerzen wrote an interesting article about some of those things and why they are wrong.

So, to help you a little, here's a small list of articles you might want to read about the issue:

Daniel

Erich

Aigars

Goerzen

Zak (again)

Steve

Yes, it was an unfortunate thing to happen. So, go fix your stuff and leave me alone.

Tidbits

2008-05-12T23:18:00.001+01:00

Whom rights?

If you're an interested in the developments of the music industry like I am, you'll bump into the sentence "rights of content owners" countless times. 10,200 is the number given by Google if you search for that term. Which doesn't cease to scare me, because people are really serious about talking about it. Shouldn't they be talking about authors rights instead?

Merankorii's new CD

Talking about music, I just announced in Merankorii's blog that Merankorii's 6th release is getting out tomorrow. This is going to be a limited edition CD split with two other bands: Ancestral and Njiqahdda. A new track from the album can already be downloaded from <Merankorii's MySpace, following Merankorii's one free track per month inniciative.

NIN, Radiohead, ColdPlay...

And this leads me to another thing I was planning to blog about for quite a long time. Some people ask me, knowing my thoughts about music 2.0, the fact that I have a musical project and a micro-label, why don't I "go free". Well, going free is great. I'm a heavy supporter of free music. I have lots of music freely available, all my tracks are licensed with Creative Commons but one - that is in Public Domain. Yet, there are things you can do and things you can't. See, some people sometimes tell me that "it's hard to have a band" or that "it's hard to have a label". No - I think that they're wrong. Having one of those has never been easier. But when you say that "my band drains all my money" I have to argue that, well, probably you aren't managing it the right way. See, NIN (above all, Radiohead and ColdPlay experiments can't measure against Nine Inch Nails in terms of concept exploration and free music money making) have the means (number of "true fans", number of listeners, awareness, carreer, investment budget,...) to do what they do, the way they do. I don't take Trent Reznor any credit for being so: I'm convinced that if he hadn't those means he would manage to do what he wanted to anyway. But doing things "the NIN way" works if you're NIN, won't probably work if you're not. So, each Noori Records release works its own way, and the same thing applies to Merankorii. Surely: I could give all Merankorii music for free, earn from ads and tips. But then I couldn't manage to have profit (which gives me increasing financing budget for both the band and the label) while making physical releases, and both me and some of Merankorii's fans wouldn't be happy without those. For those that think that music must be free, that want Merankorii's tracks but not pay for them, well, they'll have'em anyway, but one track per month. Also, when you have "pay as you want" albums and you can buy the music for a price from $1 to $20 USD, you'll only have to spend a couple of dollars if you're really in a hurry.

Free Software

To end this blog post, and keeping the talk on "Free", I'll end leaving you with a great letter that I'll resume as "Free Software - making the world a better place".

Debian Barcamp-style event to happen in Portugal

2008-05-06T16:35:00.002+01:00

At the 16th of August 2008, in Aveiro (Portugal), an event called DebianDayPT 2008 will happen, in comemoration of the 15th Aniversaty of the Debian Distribution.

This meeting aims to gather all those interested in Debian GNU/Linux distribution or in the Debian Project. Yet, it is a meeting open to all, including those not familiar with Debian or Linux.

It aims to:

create awareness of Linux, and Debian in particular
Celebrate Debian's 15th Anniversary
exchanging knowledge, thoughts and ideas about Debian GNU/Linux

They're going to be Presentations, Workshops and networking opportunities. It will start at 10am and end by 17:45.

Know more about this event at http://www.debianpt.org/debiandaypt.

Underneath It All (Nine Inch Nails Tribute)

2008-04-30T09:41:00.002+01:00

I'm not really into Nine Inch Nails, but since I know quite a few readers of this blog are fans of NIN, and since I think this compilation is going under the radar, here's some pub:

Underneath It All (Nine Inch Nails Tribute) is a free 2CD's compilation in digital format, a tribute with 31 NIN covers. It was released today, and can be freely downloaded here.

The artwork, where the track listing is, can be viewed and downloaded here.

Lest we Forget

2008-04-27T16:03:00.002+01:00

While with silence in this blog, the last two days were spent in rememberance.

In the 25th, here in Portugal, is a day to celebrate Freedom, since it was in the 25th of April that Portugal got rid of an oppressive regime. I could write countless words about the importance of this event, but instead I'll just leave you with a post about the 25th of April and Freedom.

In the 26th, time to mourn and manifest. The 22nd anniversary of Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. Anti-Nuclear Artists from all over the world decided to mark this day by releasing the (free, creative commons) "Anti-Nuclear Music Compilation". I participated with an unreleased Merankorii track. Know more about this compilation here.

Connecting to SLTalker via SSL

2008-04-25T17:29:00.000+01:00

I've missed the opportunity to see Wong Kar Wai's latest movie this evening, so instead, I kept the ride of "coding for talkers" from this morning, when I made a Twitter reader for Selva, and decided to finaly implement SSL for SLTalker. For those that do not know, SLTalker is a personal project of mine of implementing a talker-like interface for Second Life.

So, how to connect via telnet over SSL? Easy: the host is portugal-virtual.org and the port is 123. If you're in GNU/Linux or any *nix-like environment you can try

telnet -z ssl portugal-virtual.org 123

If you get an error saying that the -z option isn't available is because you don't have netkit's telnet-ssl package installed. Another option (bad choice in terms of usability, but this one works also on Windows) is to use OpenSSL and try:

openssl s_client -host portugal-virtual.org -port 123

Now, if you want a decent client, I recommend you to try out the popular TinyFugue (best known as tf), that already has SSL support in it's 5.0 version (still in beta). This is the only alternative I know to OpenSSL for Windows.

If you try this and have some feedback. please leave a comment. And yes, I know you're waiting for new features, bugs fixed and more usability: I'm working on that, but I'm yet far from ready to a new (and quite different) release. Bare with me...

TakeOff 2008 // Artists Promotion

2008-04-20T19:26:00.002+01:00

I usually try to avoid making one blog post about more than one thing, but I'm using the train travelling time to write this, and since it's stuff that is still floating in my mind, I guess it's better to write it down now than postpone it, perheaps forever.

TakeOff 2008

Yesterday, in Coimbra, we had the second year of "TakeOff" happening. TakeOff aims to be a conference about "taking off" your idea/startup (computer-related).

This year the theme was achieved a lot better, and I liked to listen to all presentations but the last one. The event was preety good overall, but the number of folks there (more or less 130) and the tight schedule (started early, presentations of 45 minutes, only three pauses - two coffee breaks and lunch time, and had to run off after the event) made me loose half a presentation, and still I didn't manage to do not even a little part of the networking I wanted to. Lot's of conversations were left open, and other didn't even start, but I guess I'll manage to fix that in the comming weeks. This quite reminds me the importance of BarCamps, and this year I expect to see a more scheduled barcamp (even if schedules go against its rules) in order to gather people wanting to go thanks to the presentations, but giving more space for debate, socialization and networking.

About the presentations themselves, there's a lot that could be said, but I don't think it would be that relevant to say it now (or maybe I'm not just in the mood): or you were there or you weren't. So here's a really quick summary.

Mário Rela, from IPNLis, talked about IPNLis, it's relation with the University of Coimbra and how do they help new ideas and seeds evolve in a pre-incubation scenario, until it's time to the actual creation of a startup. It was really quick and not in depht, so lot's of people got the wrong idea about what IPNlis gives to this startup-wannabes (hello VD). The second part of his presentation was actualy by Tiago Serra, that made a quick presentation about one project he made via IPNlis to "Ciência Viva". I already knew a lot about that project, so I think that his video worked a lot better for me than for most of the audience. It is really interesting, in particular the issues around interaction and how did he solve them (nice playful interaction there). I'll talk to Tiago into uploading the video on YouTube or something, I really think it can be inspiring. Then, we had VD from 7syntax talking. It was a nice presentation for those wanting to know a little about the experience of creating a startup and finding out what to do and how to do it. VD uploaded his presentation here (PDF). The third presentation was a "I wanted to create my company and I did it" kind of talk, nothing really noteworthy there. Then, Bruno Pedro talked about tarpipe. It's a really really interesting project, since he's framework can be used to do lots of things, but the use case they seem to be after isn't that exciting. I already knew the project and wanted to test it, but I wasn't really excited about it before the presentation. I guess he should try to explain no tarpipe's website like he did on TakeOff, maybe with a video or something. A "developer's preview" is going to be available really soon (definively in a month's time) and I'll surely play with it.

After lunch we had a presentation of the cool "wine social network" Adegga, and it was cool to know more details of what's behind that service I use. Mario Valente, now unemployed, talked about what he wasn't going to talk and why (the past, basicly), and then told us about the three ideas he had for a startup - he's choosing from one of those. This description might seem like "boooring", but it was quite the opposite. Presentation here (PDF). Oh, and I've learned to quit that silly idea of opening a live music pub :-). Then, Celso - the creator of the biggest Portuguese web portal Sapo - talked about his experience (basicly the history of Sapo). It was quite fun actually, he gave some good tips (about which I took some notes for the "to think about" list) and he ended with a cool video showing how is it like to work on an ISP... To end the day, a VC talking. If this could be the cherry on the top of the cake (better a slice of the chocolate cake, right?), it was... disappointing - and boring. I guess that those nowadays actively looking for a VC it might have been interesting, but not for most of the people, if you take in account the public reactions. End of TakeOff.

Artists Promotion

From TakeOff we headed to a restaurant, had dinner and rushed off to FNAC, where a debate about Artists Promotion was about to start. Curiously I met an old friend, and I'm sorry I hadn't much time to talk with him. But talking with him led me to some thoughts about something really wrong going on in the Portuguese computer science marketplace. But I'll leave that to the "to blog about sometime" list.

The debate was about how to do music artists promotion, and was headed by the folk behind "Santos da Casa", a Portuguese radio show dedicated to Portuguese music, the guy behind Rastilho Records, a Portuguese indie label that has acts like Dead Combo or Linda Martini, and Miro Vaz representing his new (little more than one year old) indie label "rewind music", a Portuguese indie label that releases more "radio-friendly" bands (he has several acts playing in soap operas and such). I took a lot of notes and learnt a lot, even if in the begining the event was being quite boring. I'll apply several of the things I learnt there in the future, so you'll surely read about that later. For now it's suffice to say that what shocked me the most is that this labels are working in the same way that they would do ten years ago, with the only exceptions of having a myspace for all their bands, uploading the video-clips some of their bands do up there on YouTube, and - in Rastilho's case - they also have an "online store" selling their CDs, vinyls and merch on their website. They should know better by now, even if their business isn't suffering with the loss of sales majors have to deal with.

TakeOff and Artists in Promotion

2008-04-18T18:02:00.002+01:00

I'm heading to Coimbra. Tomorrow I'll have a full day:

TakeOff 2008, 19 April, morning and afternoon
conversa "Artistas em Promoção", 19 April, evening

Expect post-blogging on both events. Have a nice weekend.

meme: top ten UNIX shell commands (revisited)

2008-04-14T09:22:00.002+01:00

Two years ago I posted here about a "top10 UNIX shell commands" memo. Seems that the memo is flooding my feeds once again, so I decided to re-run the test once again: this a another machine, I use it a lot differently, and so I expect completely different results.


[marado@Thule][09:22:14]
[~]>history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10
    67 cd
    49 vi
    33 ll
    30 ls
    26 fg
    23 gpg
    22 ssh
    22 spamc
    20 wget
    17 su

So... er... cd, ls and ll are there as obvious, same thing as they were two years ago. Also there since two years ago, is vi and fg. About that, I wrote, then:

fg should be aggregated in vi, since I almost never :q my vim instances, but, instead, put them in background...

Finaly, su (unsurprisingly), gpg (it is not everytime that I use it this frequently, tho), ssh (my work is done - a lot - in remote machines, to which I connect via ssh), spamc (yeah, I've been playing with spamassassin lately), and wget.

Regarding wget:


[marado@Thule][09:40:50]
[~]>history|grep wget|grep http|cut -d"/" -f3|sort -u

megatokyo.com
standalone.gorodok.net
www.cycliclaw.com
www.northaunt.com
www.serpent.com.pl

All of this is wget of free music, and megatokyo (I usually don't go to the website, I just wget the latest strips).

Tecnonov 2008: fiasco or success?

2008-04-06T22:51:00.001+01:00

I could start writing about this issue in a several number of ways. I could, and maybe should, start by not using a title such as "fiasco or success?". But, while a lot other prespectives could be chosen to talk about how was Tecnonov 2008, and probably some more useful than this one, I'm writting this way because I'll try to focus in what was more important for me, and what I think is important in future tech "meetings" (conferences, unconferences, social meetings, whatever) in Portugal, at least for folks like me.

First of all, Tecnonov. Tecnonov is the result of an idea that Octávio and me had while I was working at MagicBrain. The concept evolved, and in the end of 2006 we already knew exactly what we wanted. Tecnonov 2007 was, thus, planned to be a slightly technical free conference about Technology and Inovation in Portugal, in a public place (like FNAC) where anyone could pass by and listen if they were curious about the theme.

Tecnonov 2007 went well: it was Winter and the wether wasn't pushing you to go outside and play, so many people went to FNAC and ended listening to the talks that happened. Sometimes, the place was really full, with most of the people not knowing that they would be listening to a Tecnonov presentation before. But a lot of other things were also happening, like - for instance - the thirst there was for "geek meetings" in Portugal, that weren't happening.

Tecnonov 2008 was... different. We chose FNAC because it was a public place, and the event could run for free. We decided to make it bigger, so we made it from morning till dinner time. We scheduled thirteen presentations, doubling last year's. It was a sunny day. The whole day was spent with almost only the people that went there to talk about something, presenting to the others that were there doing the same. If the target was to talk about technology and innovation to a non-tech public, then Tecnonov 2008 was a fiasco.

But was it? Sure, this year we didn't have people blogging about the event afterwards (at least until now). But, for me, this was the best event I attended to in Portugal (thanks to the networking I did, the stuff I learnt, the people I met and talked to, the contacts that were made, the informal conversation it was). At least two other attendies also prefered this year's event than last years. Why? Were the presentations better? Well, maybe, but I don't believe that's what matters in this issue. I think that this year Tecnonov was a success, because people interested in technology, with similar or different backgrounds, had the chance to informally talk about different things, learn and network.

So, what's the future of Tecnonov? I don't know - it's too soon to tell. What I can say is that:

If you want to talk to non-tech people, this model doesn't work (at least as it should). I have several ideas of how to make a better model, but I'm not really interested in going into that (at least for now). (If you're interested in talking about it, feel free to leave a comment here.)

This is the kind of "informal meeting" that, at least I, was seeking with Barcamp, OpenCoffee, or "OpenPub" or whatever. We managed to do it "by chance", but the formula is not hard: and it would be awsome to have something like what this Tecnonov was for me several times a year.

"Social Meetings" or "Technical Meetings" were regulars are asked to do "Lightning Talks" or something like that, well... That doesn't work. Plus, you'll be throwing away cool oportunities. Two of the best talks this Tecnonov had for me was one from a Debian Developer talking about Debian (its philosophy, development process, community and so on), and other from a lawyer focused on "digital copyright" issues (copyright applied to computer programs and so on). I don't think I would have the pleasure to listen these guys talking if they're were invited to be there (so, no chance of these kinds of presentations in a Barcamp, for instance).

Why am I saying all this? Where am I heading to? Well, these are just "raw thoughts" that came to me after this event. They don't mean nothing - yet. What I know is that Portuguese tech people still feel the need to find ways (real places, events and forums of gathering, networking, discussion,...) of hanging out with each other. In two weeks we'll have the TakeOff conference, and this year we'll have another SHiFT. Barcamp Coimbra 2008 and Sapo CodeBits 2008 are probably happening (I suppose). But is that enough? Is that the best way? In the meantime, the best is just gathering with some people in a Pub? Or is something else that could be made?

Unrelated note: I'm, on purpose, not talking about the various talks that happened. Still, here's the note that every one of them was - for me - really interesting. Maybe I'll talk about each of them later, but that's not as important as talk about what I'm talking about in this post (at least for me).

Note to self: never do 45 minutes presentations again. If the presentations and issues are good, then the funnier part - where people discuss about it - will make any theme to take longer than 45 minutes.

Yay moment: My GPG key is finally signed by a Debian Developer: YAY!

After OOXML, XPS

2008-04-04T17:30:00.002+01:00

When you thought that OOXML was enough trouble, XPS comes to be talked about. Many people just ask why Microsoft decided to create a "standard" (OOXML) to something that already had one (ODF). My answer is: "why should they use what everyone uses, when they can make anyone use what they're using?". Sucks, I know. But OOXML was just a start: now I start to understand why Marcos Santos (from Microsoft) kept saying "we should look into the future". Is the future "let's replace every standard with a Microsoft format"? Seems so, considering they're now trying to make XPS an ISO standard.

Here's a nice looking table where you can easily understand what am I talking about (shamelessly copied from this post):

Feature	OOXML	XPS
Origin	Microsoft	Microsoft
Editor	Microsoft via Rex Jaeschke	Microsoft via Rex Jaeschke
Standards Body	Microsoft via MS-ECMA	Microsoft via MS-ECMA
Patents	Microsoft promise OSP	Microsoft promise CP
Duplication	ODF ISO26300	PDF ISO32000
ISO Liaisons	ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34	ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34
ISO plans	in progress	will be submitted to ISO
Restricted technologies	WMA, WMV, MP3, OLE, Binary space, Macros	HD-Photo

So, it seems that after forcing their own replacement for ODF, they're now trying to do the same for PDF. What will come next? HTML? Place your bets...

Tecnonov 2008, tomorrow - Fnac - Coimbra - Portugal

2008-04-04T17:20:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow I'll be at Tecnonov 2008 to talk about Virtual Worlds: pass, present and future.

Program (in Portuguese):
[ 10:30 ] - ABERTURA
[ 10:40 ] - Octávio Gonçalves - DMS Document Management System
[ 11:25 ] - João Carvalho - Palco Principal - há música na internet
[ 12:10 ] - Dr. Pedro Dias Venâncio - Copyright e Patentes no Espaço Europeu
[ 12:55 ] - ALMOÇO
[ 14:30 ] - Francisco Rente - O CERT-IPN e aposta na inovação
[ 15:15 ] - Paula Simões - Mundos Virtuais na Educação
[ 16:00 ] - Rui Seabra - O que é Software Livre?
[ 16:45 ] - Miguel Caetano - Para além da música 2.0: distribuir, partilhar, monetizar
[ 17:30 ] - Pedro Custódio
[ 18:15 ] - Rogério Reis - Debian, o Sistema Operativo Universal
[ 19:00 ] - Rui Miguel Simoes de Azevedo - Associação Ensino Livre
[ 19:45 ] - Marcos Marado - Mundos Virtuais: Passado, Presente e Futuro
[ 20:30 ] - ENCERRAMENTO

Tecnonov 2008 website

Opera Mini 4.1 beta

2008-04-03T09:58:00.002+01:00

Opera Mini is already aiming for its next release - 4.1 - and its beta is already out. If you follow this blog you know that I'm an user and fan of Opera Mini, but I'm still using Opera Mini 3, since Opera Mini 4 doesn't have an option of having the "mobile view" sliced in pages, like Opera Mini 3 has, and v4 eats too much memory trying to load an huge page at once, failing to do so and stoping me of using it to browse in my Motorola E1 cellphone.

Now that Opera announced the beta version of Opera Mini 4.1, I just had to try it. It comes with great new features:

autocomplete of URLs
offline access
search for text within a web page
download and upload files

The default search engine switched from Yahoo! back to Google (which is great, for me at least). Also, it is way quicker (enhancements were made server-side), and consumes a lot less memory (so, 4.1 fixes my issue with 4, and is going to replace my Opera Mini 3 installation). Yet, Opera Mini 4.1, even in "mobile view" mode, is slower than Opera Mini 3.

Regarding to the "beta" state of this release, like what happened with Opera Mini 4, beta really means beta: just to test out all this things, but nothing more than that, I had to fire up the browser four times because it kept crashing. So, it's still not to use, but I'm surely upgrade as soon as the final version is released.

Interview to Hype! Magazine: "How much is a game worthy?"

2008-04-03T09:27:00.000+01:00

How much is a game worthy? In the end of 2007, Radiohead made a revolution in the music distribution business by sharing their last album "In Rainbows on the Internet for free. With the music price going down to zero, and movies cheaper and cheaper, what is the right price to pay for a video game? Specialists on authorship rights and intellectual property talk about a future where games might be... free.

This is how is presented "How much is a game worthy?" article on this month's issue of the Portuguese games magazine "Hype!" by its team, an article written by Jorge Vieira (Hype!'s Operations Director) and where Manuel Luis Rocha (Department Chief on Intellectual Property of the law firm PLMJ), Duarte Nuno Vicente (Director of the Portuguese division of Virgin Play) and myself are interviewed.

Some quotes from the article:

first you have to define your goals: if the goal is to monetise your works, authors shouldn't think that they have to "avoid the free distribution of their works" in order to achieve it. In the music world, for decades artists are sharing their works for free in order to get known enough to get a deal with a record label, or in order to find out where to give concerts.

When talking about the digital world, where the perceived value of a non-physical work is tends to nothing, going free works as a first step in managing to grab user's attention

[obligatory blanket licenses would be] better than what we have now, but far from perfect. What must be done is a reflection on the concept of copyright, why was it created, and if it still makes sense

It is typical to listen someone talking about "how kids nowadays ignore copyright", but isn't it time to think if - for younger people - copyright doesn't make sense anymore? And, if it doesn't for them, does it make sense in the world?"

The trick is obvious: go viral. Make your own game, make demos and put videos on YouTube, publicise it, put them on people's mouths. Give it. Create a community around it, make your users feel as being an important part of your game. Listen your community. Create the game's blog, reply to comments, read the critics, accept suggestions. Get involved with your community, and it will grow.

If you like this article, you might be interested in attending my presentation about "Virtual Worlds: Pass, Present and Future" I'm going to do this Saturday at Tecnonov 2008, an event about Technology and Innovation in Coimbra, Portugal.

OOXML approved as an ISO standard

2008-04-01T23:23:00.002+01:00

Specially during the last year, I talked about OOXML several times in this blog. Despite already existing already an open standard for documents, Microsoft pushed its own format to be an ISO standard, and, using polemic tactics, they finally made it. The official press release isn't out there yet (it will be today), but both ECMA and Microsoft already made press releases announcing the approval.

What does this mean? Is it a defeat? As you know if you've read my previous comments on OOXML, I was against it being an ISO standard. Now that it is, it is important to stress the importance that there are two standards, ODF and OOXML, and of those only ODF is open. But I don't consider all the work made to rise issues on OOXML was in vain. The discussion arose lots of awareness about OOXML problems. OOXML was modified since its submission, and while it still has several critical problems, it is now better than it was one year ago. And the whole issue isn't over yet.

What is there to be done? Well, first of all, it's important to act wisely and understand that now that OOXML is an ISO standard, it should be supported in the biggest number of applications and platforms. For instance, OpenOffice still doesn't support OOXML (although it is already in their roadmap). Also, standards aren't immutable. The work into maintaining and enhancing document standards just doubled, but it's something that must be done. There's already work being done for ODF 1.2 (expected to be an ISO standard on Summer 2009), but surely there will be plans to release new versions of OOXML. This is quite important and shouldn't be ignored, also by (maybe specially by) people that, like me, don't like OOXML. That is the opportunity to fix OOXML problems, but there's an huge risk of having new versions pushed by Microsoft using the same tactics that were used now, making OOXML even worse for everyone but Microsoft. We all should have our eyes open to that possibility, specially because many people might expect that new versions should be automaticly approved just because the actual specification is already an ISO standard.

It that it? Will we have to deal with two standards, implement two standards, do twice the work? Well, maybe it's time to - without prejudice into the work on ODF and OOXML - create yet another format that deprecates both ODF and OOXML. This is something I really don't like, and don't think I'm recommending that, but I'm afraid that, in a not so distant future, that might be the only way of fixing all this double standards mess.

But, but... What credibility can have a standard that was approved like this? Well, not much - for those of us who know what happened, and what are the flaws in OOXML. But for non-tech people, like politicians, librarians, teachers, and everyone else, it will not be clear that this standard isn't a good choice. And here's where we must act. For instance, EU wants to have all their documents in a standard format. We (Europeans) are the ones who should show them why they shouldn't choose OOXML. Who else?

UPDATE: ISO official announcement here

Links

2008-03-31T23:28:00.000+01:00

To make a change to my latest blog articles, here's a post of "links".

First of all, congratulations Prt.Sc. Prt.Sc is a Portuguese blogs aggregator and I'm happy to be one of the screenies that are aggregated there. Prt.Sc is, for me, with no doubt the best information source for Portuguese geeks (since there's a big ratio of Portuguese content, I don't think it is quite suitable for non-Portuguese readers). It is now making 3 years, and I'm quite confident that this next one is going to be exciting.

Then, Merankorii. For those who still don't know, Merankorii is my own musical project. There are quite some news about it: tomorrow is the official release date of Merankorii's fifth album "A Viagem", that is going to be released both in MP3 format and as a 30-copies extremely limited CD edition with a packaging that doesn't let anyone be indiferent about it. Also, and following what happens with the third CD "Melencolia III", now "Sanguine", the fourth Merankorii album, is also available in MP3 in a "Name Your Own Price" regime: from $1 USD to $20 USD, you can choose how much you want to pay to have my music.

As some of you noticed, my recent blog post about the Document Freedom Day is generating a lot of comments, mainly from me and Microsoft's Marcos Santos, where it is being somewhat debated wether OOXML is or not suitable of being an ISO standard. It's not a surprise that the theme is being so much debated all over the internet this last few days: yesterday the vote submissions ended, and now everyone is just waiting for ISO to announce what are the results (is OOXML is aprooved as an ISO standard or not). ISO already said that the anouncement is going to happen wednesday (I wonder if they did it just to avoid having a press release mistaken as an April's Fool joke). There are some blogs doing an excelent job of tracking down all the announcements and rumors about the vote of each country, and predicting the result. By now, we all already expect OOXML to be aproved by ISO, since the chances of the result being another are dimming almost every hour.

I've already linked to my friendfeed, but I'll do it again. I'm using it more regularly, and I really like the way I use it and how I quickly get track of what my "friends" are doing. I'm also using it to post quick comments or links, so if you're fond of this posts where I give you a collection of links, you might want to follow me on friendfeed.

Some time ago I wrote about OpenCoffee and how it was (not) working in Portugal. VD decided to take a slightly different approach and ended creating "OpenPub", here in Lisbon. I really prefer this concept: people get together to have a drink (to socialize), but since you're gathering informally people with somewhat simmilar interests (or at least with interests in the same field), the socialization ends fruitous. I didn't manage to be present in any of the gatherings that happened until now, but I really hope that this starts happening even more spontaneously (with more people yelling "let's have a drink!", and doing it more frequently), and, of course, that I manage to be in one of those gatherings. The most similar thing I had recently was the dinner from the Document Freedom Day celebration here in Lisbon, and I suppose I'll have fun this weekend, at...

...Tecnonov 2008. Tecnonov 2008 is going to happen at the 5th (this saturday), whole day, in Coimbra. The entry is free, and the talks good. We'll also have free swag (t-shirts included), a Debian key-signing party, and the promise of an event that - like last year - is surely extend itself all night long. I hope to see you there!

Open Letter To NVIDIA

2008-03-27T23:38:00.001Z

I'm all for Openess. In my last blog post I talked a little about Open Documents, this time I'm going to talk about something different: hardware. While it doesn't shock me that hardware plans are kept close and secret, I think that hardware specs should be allways open. Hardware specs is what will enable anyone to interact with the hardware you make and using all its features. A great example of why this is needed is NVIDIA: their graphics hardware don't have their specs open, and so the experience of using their hardware in systems like GNU/Linux are far from perfect. To convince NVIDIA to change their policy, there's an Open Letter to NVIDIA, saying:

We the GNU/Linux community and the undersigned, kindly request that you, NVIDIA Corporation, increase your efforts in better enabling the open-source community to develop free software drivers for your graphics hardware. Your major competitors in this market, AMD/ATI and Intel, have not only supported the community in open-source driver development efforts but they are now openly releasing hardware programming documentation.

While we are grateful that your company provides one of the best closed-source graphics drivers for Linux, it is not without its problems and prevents many users from having a truly free software platform. You have shown an open-source passion in the past when dropping the nforce-net binary blob in favor of the community-spawned forcedeth driver for Ethernet support on your motherboard chipsets. There has been a rumor that you may be developing an open-source strategy for your graphics products, so if that is the case please let us know your true intentions. Even if you were only able to open a subset of your Linux driver, this still would show a sign of solidarity to the free software world.

We stand united under the name OpenTheBlob.com, but realize that legally it may be next to impossible to open-source the binary portion of your graphics driver due to patents and preserving some intellectual property in this competitive market. What we are, however, asking you for is to support the open-source community to the fullest extent possible. The open-source "nv" driver that you provide for X is an abhorrent disaster that is limited to 2D acceleration and doesn't come without its share of limitations and shrouded code. We look to NVIDIA for providing concise programming documentation to willing open-source developers that is not encumbered by Non-Disclosure Agreements or other legal restrictions.

There is an interested group of developers at hand that are willing to contribute towards an open 3D NVIDIA driver. The Nouveau developers are committed to these free software ideals to the extent that they have spent years reverse engineering your hardware without ever receiving any funds for this immense work, but rely upon community donations. An official open-source driver could complement your binary driver, in order to provide a better "out of the box" experience on many Linux distributions and satisfying the customers -- including corporate clients -- who mandate open-source software.

In a steadfast manner, we request knowing your true commitment to the GNU/Linux and open-source communities. For everyday that you stand by idle, your competitors are continuing to refine their open-source drivers and pushing out more documentation that is better enabling the open-source community. Please let us know what is going on and join the open-source community in this effort.

If you agree with this text, please consider signing this open letter.

Document Freedom Day

2008-03-25T22:59:00.000Z

This one is going to be short, I promise.

Tomorrow is going to the the "Document Freedom Day". I intend to celebrate it in Lisbon. If you want to celebrate it in Portugal you might be interested in checking about the events in Lisbon and Oporto. If you want to know about other countries, there's a list aggregating the events happening all over the world.

Document Freedom is an important matter. I've been a fan and user of LaTeX for more than 10 years. The main reason I liked it in the first place was the easyness of creating, writting an maintaining a document. I remember having a really old 386 laptop which only use was a LaTeX compiler, the vim editor and a DVI viewer. What starting as being "wow, this is a cool new way of doing stuff, without that boring formating crap and I'm really more produtive with it!", quickly started being a lot more things, as I stumbled upon more advantadges. See, LaTeX is an Open Format. Besides being available in any Operating System I stumbled upon, the fact that it is distributed under the terms of the LPPL, thus being free software, made it suitable for a lot of uses. Heck, I earned some real money doing translators and interpreters of, or using, LaTeX. The beauty of it was that, since it was open, anybody could read, alter, interpret or otherwise manipulate a TeX document. I was happy, but the format never was really adopted but in some specific cases or scenarios, and in the academic world (specially Mathmatics, since LaTeX has the most powerful - in my oppinion at least - way of representing math formulas). On one hand, LaTeX is only suitable to produce word processing documents, formulas or presentations. Office suites give you that, and also spreadsheets and charts. On the other hand, even if fully documented, LaTeX (and TeX) aren't standards.

I heard for the first time about ODF in 2002. Of course I knew that there were concurrent formats to those of Microsoft Office, but as soon as I heard about ODF I became more happy. No, I wasn't intending to be a ODF user. I still do my documents in LaTeX, even today. But this was - finaly - a document format, open as (La)TeX, but an "office suite format", meaning that it would also cover spreadsheets and charts. The cherry on the top of the cake, those making ODF happen wanted it to be an Open Standard. Great! I was not the only one - of course - understanding the power and importance of an Open Standard for documents. Documents in an open format - specially if regulated by a standards body, warrants you long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers. In 2004 the European Union understood its importance, and demanded from the existing vendors the existence of a document standard. The ODF work was already being done, and in 2005 ODF became an OASIS standard, a step into 2006 where it became an ISO standard. In that same year I attended to XTech '06, where I met Donna that spoke about ODF, Our Document Future. It was a great presentation in many ways: The talked about the importance of digital preservation, how can we do it, and why ODF was the best choice. She then talked about the massive adoption that ODF was already having in Australia, with the Digital Preservation front efforts. That was just the beggining: Italy adopted ODF in 2007, the same year that saw ODF 1.1 as an ISO standard (1.2 should be ready in summer 2009), and nowadays ODF is being considered and already adopted, in some cames more massively than in others, in countries like Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, France, Norway, Japan, Germany and Malaysia.

But Donna also told in her 2006's presentation that the future would bring us dark clouds in our sunshining scenario: Microsoft and OOXML. She was right. See, Microsoft has no commercial interest of adopting ODF (or any standard, for the matter). Yet, with all political pressure, it is mandatory that they support a standard... So they decided to create their own, which was aprooved as an ECMA standard in December 2006 and is now in the process of trying its aprooval as an ISO standard. Microsoft doesn't really support ODF (despite their trolls saying "but we pay for the development of converters!"): if they wanted to support the ODF standard, even if not their format of choice, ODF would be integrated in a stock instalation of their Office Suite. Also, if you considered that they were never interested in contributing into making ODF a better standard (which would be the natural action of a party interested in the field) that would serve for their technical purposes, you can't really think nor expect people to believe that Microsoft was really interested in a standard. But OOXML is worse than that: it isn't open (thus, even if it turns into a standard it will never be an open standard), is encumbered with software patents, while supposedly being a XML format (like ODF) has in its specs examples that show invalid XML, and has an incomplete specification.

I could go on and on about all the process and steps that Microsoft made this last couple of years to make OOXML a standard, refering to the way they admitedly bought votes and comitees, how issues were handled and so far, but I don't think that's useful. Last October I was invited to be the chair to a debate about ODF and OOXML. Not even one of the dozens of entities that supposedly support OOXML in Portugal were available to attend. The excuse of Microsoft, for instance, was that "during the aproval process there were made personal acusations to Microsoft workers in newspapers and blogs, so we don't have conditions in participating". This same Microsoft employee writes frequently in several blogs whenever the issue arises. But what really made me stop writting much about the issue was the fact that... it's a war I can't win, and that pisses me off. Everytime someone talks about the issue, dozens of Microsoft-payed people (they admited it) go to the blogs and flood them with lies, circular references, and anti-IBM or anti-SUN messages. They have the means and the money to do that, I don't. But I still have the truth with me, and tomorrow I'll show it. Because the world doesn't need to be controled by some corporation. The world needs Document Freedom.

Personal Log

2008-03-22T17:33:00.000Z

After going to work on monday, I took the rest of the week as vacations. I had lot's of thoughs of what to do in this days, and despite not having done lot's of things on the mental list (like finaly visiting "Livraria Trama" or "Discoselecção", two Lisbon stores I'm planing paying a visit to for a while now, or Cascais' lighthouses), it was a fulfilling time in many ways. I also took the time to do some things I constantly want to do but lack the time for it, like watching some movies (I count eight for the vacations, until now) and series, doing some research on various topics, reading some papers, reading an awsome design magazine (this month's issue was about "music packaging design", and there wasn't a single uninteresting article in it!), buying a couple of books and reading some others.

Lately I've been having some job purposals - some more formal than others - and while lots of them were to get me involved in some thrilling projects, I'm writing this to state a curious thing: most people seem not to understand my thrill in working at Sonaecom. There's this weird idea people have that big companies only have boring jobs: in the tecnological field people seem to assume that the only jobs there are is those of "code monkeys" (in the concept that describe those as "don't think, write" kind of coding jobs). Well, I'm not even working as a coder at Sonaecom, but most of all, I don't agree with the assumption that there are no cool/"mind thrilling" jobs at big companies. If these same people think (I assume, but I might be wrong here) that there are thrilling jobs at big companies like Google or Yahoo!, why shouldn't they assume that are cool jobs in - in this case - big Portuguese companies? Besides, there's a factor that for some isn't a plus but for me it is: the scale factor. In Sonaecom I'm not liding with a couple of costumers, I'm working with lot's and lot's of them. If you factor the number of affected clients buy the enhancement you just did... Even a small thing can cause great impact. And that's thrilling - for me. All in all, it's great to have doors open, and it's great to see that, if I wanted to, I could jump from my job and get a thrilling (perheaps even better) one more or less easily. But I'm very pleased with the job I have now, and I have no intentions of changing jobs soon.

As you might have noticed (perheaps because I think I've mentioned this in my last blog posts), I've been blogging a lot less. This doesn't mean nothing - really - I'm just spending my time doing other things. I still consider myself as a blogger and I don't think that will change. But my perception about blogs or blogging might have been changing in the last few months. I've been, for instance, reflecting on the "blogs as wiki's" idea for a while. Also, since I found myself involved with "new" concepts like microblogging or lifestream, I started to realize various uses and ways to use these tools (both the "new" ones and the "old" blog). For instance, I believe that if I were to track each visitor on this blog and profile him, I would reach the conclusion that the person that uses this blog the most, in most various ways and for several different purposes, is me. And that made me, once again, reinforce my position of "blogging to myself". To give you an example, this blog entry will help me remember that I want to pay a visit to Trama or Discoselecção, the same way I just used my cellphone and this blog to see the list of cellphones I'm considering buying earlier today, or the way I used the search tool of this blog to remember the link to a Web 2.0 service I wrote about, and that I wanted to use yesterday.

Finaly, there are some things I should have done and I didn't this vacations. I still have to finish my work on the release of Merankorii's latest album "A Viagem" (from which, I'm happy to say, the packaging was a success, making me sell a couple of CD's just because of it), dedicate once again some time to the organization of "Tecnonov 2008", a Technology and Innovation conference I'm organizing and that will happen in April, and some Noori Records work (which will bring you some news). Yet, I don't think I'll dedicate the rest of my vacations to this issues, and instead will enjoy the time reading - basicly.

Choosing a cellphone 2008

2008-03-13T19:06:00.002Z

It's time again: two years ago I choose which computer I would carry all the time would be, and now it's time to choose a cellphone again.

This time, and after a really quick grep, I came out with this possibilities:

Motorola E1000 - UMTS 2100, Bluetooth v1.1 Motorola E1070 - UMTS 2100, Bluetooth v1.2 with A2DP Motorola V3XX - HSDPA 850 / 1900 Motorola K3 - HSDPA 2100

If you have any experience or thoughts about any of this cellphones, please leave me a comment. I'm particulary interested in knowing

how does it behaves while being used as a modem, via bluetooth
how does it's embeded browsers behaves,
how does Opera Mini behaves there

Thanks!

How can I get the telnet client on Windows Vista?

2008-03-13T09:31:00.002Z

Windows Vista comes by default with no telnet client. To turn it on, go to:

Control Panel > Programs and Features > > Turn Windows features on or off > > > Telnet Client

Why it isn't there in the first place... well, that beats the shit out of me.

Crowdsourcing

2008-03-11T19:27:00.004Z

The Vienna University of Economics and Business administration is making a study on Crowdsourcing (see my first post on the issue here). The study, to which I contributed, still isn't available, but you can read a summary of the research in this PDF. Eight crowdsourcing communities were analyzed, including SellABand (my thoughts on SellABand here). This summary doesn't give much juice about the matter, specially if you're into the concept of Crowdsouring, but yet it seems a good resource, specially for those thinking about being in the crowdsourcing market. Most of all, the summary promises that the research, when available, is a must read.